Webinar on the Geography of Existing and Potential Alternative Fuel Markets in the United States (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Webinar on the Geography of Existing and Potential Alternative Fuel Markets in the United States presented on Feb. 18, 2015.

COORDINATOR: Thank you for standing by. At this time all lines will be on listen only mode until the question and answer session of today's call. At that time it will be star 1 from your touch tone phone to ask a question. The call is also being recorded. If you have any objections please disconnect.

I'd like to introduce Sandra Loi. You may begin.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you so much. Good morning or good afternoon everyone depending on where you're calling from. Welcome to our monthly Clean Cities Webinar. Today's Webinar is on the geography of existing and potential alternative fuel markets in the United States.

I know we probably primarily have our Clean Cities coordinators on the line but we have some stakeholders are new welcome and in case you are not as familiar with Clean Cities, the program has been in place for over 20 years now.

And the mission and goals of the program if we could cut petroleum production in the transportation sectors, we do that through our nearly 100 coalitions which are led by coordinators located throughout the United States who work with their local states and governments to educate them.

And assist them in a transition to alternative fuels and advanced vehicles technologies. So today's Webinar will be presented by Caley Johnson from the National Renewable Energy Lab out here in Golden, Colorado.

And his Webinar will explain an NREL project that mapped indicators of existing and potential fuel supply and demand to provide insight into the regional applicability of various alternative transportation fuel.

I'll go ahead and introduce Caley in just a moment but just as a reminder the Webinar is being recorded. And we will be posting on the Clean Cities Website afterwards. We will be hosting a question and answer sessions that will take place at the end of Caley's presentation so hang tight.

Feel free to input questions on the online Q&A as we go. And otherwise we will open up the lines for phone questions at the end of Caley's presentation. Let me go ahead and introduce our speaker, Caley Johnson. Caley is an analysts for the Clean Cities program.

He heads the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In this role is assess the market penetration and potential of alternative fuels and advanced vehicle technology.

Caley created the maps and data Website and wrote the E85 Business Case for Fuel Retailers, the Natural Gas Business Case for Municipal Governments and the Geography of Alternative Fuel Markets Report which is what he is going to be presenting on today.

Before working at NREL Caley was a project manager for the Climate Protection Partnership Division of the EPA. Caley holds a Bachelor's of Arts Degree in Biology from the University of Colorado and a Master of Environmental Management degree from Yale University.

And I'm Sandra Loi, if I didn't introduce myself. I'm also working here at the National Renewable Energy Lab working on the Clean Cities program. So without further ado I'll pass it off to Caley. Caley you may begin.

CALEY JOHNSON: Thanks Sandra. Most of you are familiar with the Clean Cities program that Sandra mentioned. And part of the brilliance of the Clean Cities program and a reason for much of its success is that it doesn't try to fit a one-size fit all solution to each of the—to each area.

To each individual Clean Cities region and so that was kind of the genesis of this project is to look deeper into the regionality of the different alternative fuels and kind of get a feel for where certain alternative fuels work best.

And so for the project overview and how we did that is, so to get an idea for what fuels work in what locations we wanted to map the relative market strength.

And by market strength I mean indicators of both supply and demand for a compressed natural gas, electricity, E85, B20, propane and associated vehicles.

You may notice that hydrogen and liquefied natural gas weren't a part of this project and largely because those markets are much kind of simpler and straightforward.

And also hydrogen has had a lot of in depth analysis into this and liquefied natural gas is also kind of more strategically directed rather than responding directly to the market.

The next purpose of this project was to prioritize and convey what the most important indicators when a stakeholder is choosing an alternative fuel. You guys are intimately aware of your areas and what'd going on within your coalition those of you who are stakeholders.

And so part of this project is to help kind of give you an idea of what you should be looking for when assessing your local market for a given fuel. And finally a third purpose of this project is to drive lessons learned from unexpected markets.

There's quite a few markets that we authors in consultation with industry experts were surprised at why they showed up as looking good and as we dug into those unexpected markets we found some good lessons learned that can be applied to general market creation for alternative fuels.

So the process on how we did this and all of these points on this project overview slide I'll be digging into deeper in later slides so the process we weighted market indicators based on a literature search and a generalized methodology and logic framework.

Then we did fuel specific adjustments base on industry expert's review of the maps. We went out to the well-known industry experts, had them review the maps and had them pick out specific points and say, you know, this isn't actually a good market or this is a good market.

And it's not showing up and we adjusted the weightings of these different indicators to kind of reflect their expertise. So we kind of created a framework to capture their expertise and get it into a numerical and a GIS format.

And the finally, as part of the process we would—we determined that the best markets and investigated those unexpected results and we kind of like highlight the best markets. So when going about this project for the audience we had foremost the Clean Cities coordinators.

This is also very relevant to local and state policy makers that may be choosing to incentivize a certain alternative fuel. It's also very relevant to investors and by investors I mean both fleet manager that are going to be investing in vehicles and stations and also just a fuel station owners.

And finally we wrote this for entrepreneurs, like vehicle manufacturers and dealerships. So what are the indicators of market strength that we looked at? These indicators are listed in general order of priorities.

So the first, the one that we placed the most priority on in our general ranking scheme is existing fueling station. That's a good indicator of existing markets. Are these fueling stations able to stay up and running and as a primary indicator of supply?

And then number two, vehicle density and that's a primary indicator of demand of the current market. And for vehicle density we included, we looked at the pulled registration data and we also included freight traffic which takes into account the demand from heavy duty vehicles.

And we also for electric vehicles we also looked at hybrids because there's been studies showing that a large portion of electric vehicle owners are previous hybrid purchasers.

So those are the two indicators of current market supply and demand and then these next four are indicators of potential supply and demand. We have gasoline and diesel prices so the more expensive gasoline and diesel prices are the more economical alternative fuels general are.

And so that's what this map off to the right is and I highlight this one because this will be applied to pretty much all of the fuels. You can see basically you have, when you're in the Gulf Coast area you have the cheapest gasoline and the diesel map mirrors the gasoline map.

It's largely driven by state fuel taxes and the transport infrastructure of how we transport gasoline and diesel. So essentially when you're in the Gulf area you have the cheap gasoline. I will use a highlighter here. All right. That's kind of tough to see.

But when you're in the Gulf area the cheap gasoline and then as you go further north say up to New York or if you go further west, say over to California it gets more expensive generally.

You have this one lucky zone up through Missouri that remains relatively inexpensive for how far north it gets but that's the general pattern for gasoline and diesel prices.

And then the four indicator we have state incentives and this is a good indicator not only for the direct results of the incentives for the way it makes projects less expensive. It's also a good indicator because it indicates the priorities of the state legislature and therefore ideally the citizens.

The people that voted the state legislator into power and the people whose priorities are being represented by the state legislature that put these—that enacted these state incentives. The fifth indicator of market strength is the resource proximity.

How close are you to an ethanol refinery or a biodiesel refinery? There have been studies showing—there have been studies that showed that people that lived in communities with an ethanol production facility.

Or a biodiesel production facility are more likely to refuel with E85 or with biodiesel so we took that proximity into account. And finally the environmental benefit.

This is applied to electricity because electricity has greater environmental benefits depending on what the electricity is produced by. So for example electricity up in Washington is largely from hydro, very clean, very low carbon.

There's a greater environmental benefit than an electric vehicle in say from Wyoming where it comes largely from coal. So those are the six indicators of market strength.

I'm going to take a moment to discuss the indicators that are not included because generally a lot of people start having questions at this point, on oh this would be a good indicator and this would be a good indicator.

So I want to show you how many of the common indicators in literature searches are wrapped up into those six indicators that I talked about. One indicator that is commonly used in studies like this are household income.

And we didn't use household income because that is supplanted by the AFV registration. We wanted a more direct indicator. And the people that have already purchased alternative fuel vehicles that takes—that basically takes the household income into account.

It gets more at what we want to know rather than the household income which is a bit noisier. Population density. This is supplanted by the vehicle density and the existing infrastructure.

Those two indicators largely reflect the population density plus more factors that we want to get at and so by using those we once again get rid of a lot of noise in the data. The third is the proportion of households with one or—with more than one vehicle. That's definitely of interest.

It's logical but that's also supplanted by the AFV registrations. Another indicator not used is the heavy duty vehicle density. This is supplanted by the freight ton miles.

And the reason we did this is that freight ton miles shows where the heavy duty vehicles are being used and also the pulled heavy duty vehicle registration just isn't adequate because a lot of those registrations are not where the vehicle is operating.

They are tied back to the headquarters of the company so that's why freight ton miles is a better indicator. Voting preferences is another potential indicator that we didn't use.

And the reason we didn't use it is we used the more direct reflection of people's voting preferences and that is do they vote for politicians that promote alternative fuels through pro-alternative laws and incentives.

So that's what we take into account. Commuting distance we don't take into account because we need to find a sweet spot because everyone knows that too long of a commute is bad especially for electric vehicles because of range anxiety.

But it's also too short of a commute is bad as well because then people's investment in that potentially more expensive alternative fuel vehicle won't pay back as quickly.

And so more research needs to be done into that before we can take that into account as an indicator and the same with the average regional temperature. High temperatures improve the battery performance however, high temperatures also decrease battery life.

And so more research is needed before we can kind of find a sweet spot on temperature to know exactly where the best area is for EVs. And then finally education campaigns.

Some of the industry experts that we had review the—that we had reviewed this paper thought we should take education campaigns in to account but we looked into it but it's too difficult to track and define regionally.

Okay. So we have the six indicators and we—so we weighted them in this general way as they're listed from left to right here. But for some of the fuels we had to switch their weightings, let see. There we go.

And so, and there are lessons to be learned through how we either decreased the weighting which is indicated by the red circles or increased the weighting which is indicated by the green circles.

So for electric vehicles we increased the weighting—or we decreased the weighting at their existing infrastructure because the majority of electrical vehicles owners recharge at home. So that's why the infrastructure had less impact.

And conversely natural gas vehicles we increased the weighting of the infrastructure and this was largely because since the infrastructure reflects the population density it kind of counterbalanced a lot of the factors that were running against population density.

So we increased the weighting on existing infrastructure. And I explained that this category—so okay so the vehicles density was kind of split for some of the fuels between the straight up vehicle density which is the pulled registrations and the freight ton miles for biodiesel and natural gas.

And in that same column we have the ATV registration density for electricity so that's why I put those blue arrows between the two is because there's kind of a balance between those two factors.

Another indicator that we decreased is vehicle density for propane and that's because the pulled data that we have is relatively incomplete and just not as robust for propane and is it for other vehicle registrations.

We also decrease the impact of gasoline and diesel prices on ethanol and that's because ethanol right now kind of follows the price of gasoline when it's prices at the retail level.

So therefore the—therefore as you go to a place with higher gasoline prices you tend to have higher E85 prices also. So it makes that difference less important.

For resource proximity we increased the weighting for ethanol because that's where there's been shown a strong correlation between having an ethanol plant and people being pro E85 and more likely to use the E85.

And we decreased it for natural gas because natural gas is transported so easily via pipeline. And then finally we—the environmental benefit factor is more heavily weighted for electricity than other fuels because it's the only one that really applies—or very easily applies to a fuel. Okay.

And now we have how indicators are combined and mapped. So we have maps of each one of these indicators which I'll show later on in the presentation.

And we broke these maps into 10 by 10 kilometer squares, which will show up as pixels on these maps and then we changed all of the maps to percentiles so for example instead of dollars per gallon for gasoline we changed it to, it's kind of like a grading on a curve.

Are you in an area where gasoline costs in the 75 percentile or are you in an area where gasoline costs is the 5 percentile. So essentially that takes all the units away and gives us a level playing field. So then within each square we can weight those indicators.

We can weight those percentiles according to the weightings I just went over and then we can add those together for a combined score and then that combined score is mapped for each one of these 10 by 10 kilometer squares.

And it's grouped into a quintile and that means that the bottom 20% is light grey, and then the top 20% is bright red. And so it's basically grouped into five categories in the map. So let's start by looking at biodiesel. We'll look at the components of biodiesel here.

And so these are the maps that are not—they aren't broken down into percentiles yet. These are the real maps with real units and therefore you end up with a lot more grey than the other colors on these components maps but the real units are just easier to understand and track.

And it kind of more firmly ground in reality as opposed to kind of moving from the percentile to the weighted system. And so, here as I mentioned you have the stations weighted at 24%. And then you have the freight ton miles weighted at 20%. You have the diesel prices weighted at 16%.

You have the diesel vehicle registrations weighted at 15%. Then you have the, so with this map in the upper left hand corner is—are the biodiesel production facilities and its 100 mile radii around the production facilities.

It's because there's some literature showing that the economics for bio—the economics for trucking fuels are a lot better at around 100 miles then, you know, so there's a bit of a—we had to choose a threshold for a distance from the plant so we based that threshold on how far you can truck a biofuel.

So this doesn't take into account the rail lines but that gets much more complicated then. And remember this is also a reflector of the kind of sociological, the people that are living near the biodiesel factories.

And working there and therefore are pro biodiesel and so it kind of takes their potential commute distance into account to show where the pro biodiesel population would be living and then finally we have the number of biodiesel incentives here.

And I should mention that for all of these—actually I'll mention that on the next slide. Okay so we take those six indicators, switch them all to percentiles and map them accordingly. Kind of how I was—how I mentioned the previous slide. And here is the map of the biodiesel markets.

And so red is the top 20% of best biodiesel markets. Yellow here is the next 20%. Those are the second place. And then you have the dark grey is next. And then medium grey like around here. And finally light grey is the bottom 20%.

And so what we see here is that Chicago is the biodiesel strong hold. Like the great, I mean I use the term Chicago loosely. The large area like of the Midwest generally surrounding Chicago. It's a strong—it's a major stronghold.

And then we have the urban areas linking highways from Atlanta up to Boston. That whole eastern corridor is really big and I remind you that the kind of spaghetti like texture of this map is due to the freight ton miles that follow interstates.

And then we also have a bunch of islands of promising market potential. And these kind of in order of the size and strength of these islands. You have Memphis, Tennessee. Houston and Dallas, Texas. Denver, Colorado. Phoenix. That are all very large islands of good market potential.

And now as I said we worked with the market experts and got their feedback incorporated into these maps and some unexpected market strength at least that the experts were kind of surprised about include North Dakota and that's largely because this biodiesel refinery up there.

The Oklahoma panhandle and southwestern Oregon and all these areas biodiesel refineries and a high number of state incentives pushed the market ratings up into high categories. I should highlight that North Carolina, strong word for you North Carolina coordinators. Your state really stands out.

It's super strong because you have many pro biodiesel incentives and a disproportionate number of B20 refueling stations. A matter of fact you have 18% of the nation's total with only 3% of the U.S. population. And to point out the kind of weaker markets.

We have Wyoming, Utah and Idaho with the weakest general biodiesel markets. Okay. So let's move on to ethanol. Since I explained all these maps for biodiesel I will glance over them.

Sandra sent you the slides before the presentation and you can look into your areas into greater depth in these maps. I'll glance over them. I already explained kind of the reasoning or the rationale for these weighting numbers for ethanol. And so for ethanol these are the five components.

In here we have the conglomerate ethanol market map. And so naturally it should come to—as no surprise that the Midwest is the big strong E85 market. And so given that let's look outside the Midwest.

And so some big potential markets outside the Midwest are definitely the large greater San Francisco, Oakland even Sacramento area is very strong. And I'm listing all of these little islands of strong ethanol markets and I'm listing them in order of strength and size.

So you have the San Francisco Bay area is the largest. And then you have Los Angeles, second largest. Denver, third largest and the greater Denver, Boulder, even Fort Collins area.

And then you have New York City, you have the Rochester, Buffalo area. Houston, Miami and Dallas that all have very largest E85 markets. The weakest ethanol markets are found in the region comprising Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Nevada and Montana.

And so this area right around there is the weakest. And so the market experts were surprised the markets in Kansas and Missouri were not as strong as some of the areas to their northeast. This is likely because Missouri has some of the cheapest gasoline prices in the country. Few ethanol incentives.

And no local sources in the southwest portion of the state. So that's kind of why Missouri and Kansas aren't showing up as super strong markets. So now let's move onto compressed natural gas. So here are the components of compressed natural gas and how they are weighted.

Sorry I couldn't post the map of the resource proximity for natural gas because that was restricted but that's only 8%—that only has an 8% weighting anyway. And so how do these five or six components all come together for the compressed natural gas markets?

You'll see that so in order the strongest markets by state you have Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, then California, then Pennsylvania, Utah, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Ohio and Washington that all have the strongest areas. So right around here and then west coast.

Oklahoma's CNG market is stronger than it appears on the map because it has a state has large number of CNG vehicles and refueling stations but these—they tend to be concentrated together which is a good thing but on the map it kind of leaves quite a few grey areas.

So just keep in mind that Oklahoma is very strong. It's even stronger than it looks largely because many of the vehicles and refueling stations are clumped together. There's a swath of relatively poor CNG markets from Alabama up to Idaho. Here you can see that line there.

And then it surprised market experts to see the sparsely populated areas in Eastern Washington—sorry—out here in Eastern Washington which has a low population and Southeastern California and Southwestern Colorado and Southeast Utah rated high on the CNG map.

So the reason for this is these markets were bolstered by numerous—they have a lot of natural gas production despite having a low density of CNG vehicles so this is one case where we tried to—where we increase the indicators that kind of represent population density.

And so that's the vehicle density and the alternative fuel stations. We increased those and yet if we increase them to the point where these sparsely densely populated areas were showing as bad markets then it really messed up the rest of the map.

So these need—when looking at this map you need to take those areas with a grain of salt. All right. And now let's look at the propane component. So propane, here we have all the factors that I listed, the fuel stations, the gasoline prices, the number of propane incentives.

And then the propane vehicles. Remember these propane vehicles are weighted lower than for all the other fuels because the data we have is less complete for propane vehicles.

And then we have the resource proximity which we use both oil refineries and natural gas processing plants as resource proximity for propane because it's produced in about equal quantities from both of those sources.

And so you group those five components together and here's the propane market map. And so striking feature of the propane market map is that it is more fragmented than most of the other fuels. You can see you'll have spots. Let's take Illinois for example.

You can have spots of red here, well, you know, you can spots of red right next to a spot of medium grey, you know, and so you have—and maybe Texas is the best example of this. You have really hot markets right next to pretty non hot markets with propane more so that the other vehicles.

So that could be because the stations and the fuel—the stations and the vehicles are grouped together better, are clumped together which is a good thing but all in all it leaves the map looking a bit less optimistic than some of the other fuels. So let's look at the best areas of propane markets.

So you have a high frequency of strong markets here in Indiana foremost. And then next you have it in Connecticut and then California and then Illinois. And then Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, Ohio and Mississippi. So those have large consistent markets.

And then the markets that are particularly weak are in South Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming. So market experts noted that Georgia and South Carolina have strong propane markets that aren't really indicated by our data.

And this is largely driven by the propane bus industries, Blue Bird and Thomas buses. And, yes so that's why Georgia and South Carolina in this map aren't looking as good as potentially they should.

And so we've actually been working with Polk on merging datasets so we can capture that in future renditions of these maps. Now let's look at the electricity components. I have to apology for the different format in the ATV density.

I requested these—all of these component map just for this presentation. The component maps aren't actually aren't in the report and so I put in my request and then I forgot to request ATV density so I just did a screen shot from trans atlas that's why that looks different.

But electricity as I mentioned we weighted ATV density as the most influential indicator. Even more influential than the EV density because as we look into the future there's a strong probability that current ATV owners will be purchasing electric vehicles.

They're the most likely people to be purchasing electric vehicles and then we have the EV ownership registrations. And—I should mention these, so these registrations are all in density so it's the number of registrations per ten square miles and then you have—oh sorry. So that's the 16% here.

And so this is an area where the electric charging stations is then the second highest weighted indicator and then you have the EV density down here on the lower left. And then you have gasoline retail prices on the lower right and then we have more on the next slide. So this quite an interesting map.

So this is showing the greenhouse gas, basically the carbon intensity of electricity from different areas. And so you have a huge area of really low carbon electricity largely from hydro up here in the Northwest.

And then of particular interest I want to highlight this little section of a lot of wind power and low carbon electricity in Western Texas because that will heavily influence the map. Not heavily but it makes a difference in the map.

And so then yes you can see this map is largely a balance so, you know, where's electricity produced by coal. You have right up here, up and down kind of the Rockies here versus where are the areas with more renewables and more natural gas electricity production.

And then I also want to highlight, so the source of electricity. Since electricity is ubiquitous in the United States, for the source we used a different map. We used residential, or the density of residential photovoltaic installations.

And this is because there's been a few studies that correlate people that own PV panels on their roofs. They are very likely to also own electric vehicles and to purchase electric vehicles. And so not only is there good correlation but this makes a lot of sense logically.

You know a lot of people that are producing their electricity for the same motives that they purchase photovoltaic they also think hey that would be cool if I can like power my own car off of my own PV panels. You know, and it's just people have a lot the aligning priorities.

So we included that as kind of the source component on the electrical vehicle maps. And I want to highlight that there's a lot of PV installations in Arizona here even though, and yes, you'll see a difference that will come into effect in the EV market map which is right here.

So yes, as I mentioned you can see here Western Texas was a bit of a surprise and that's largely because they're a clean electricity there. And then a major strong point here is in the Northwest and because of their clean electricity and Washington has a lot more going for it.

And then another surprise which was caused by the heavy PV installations is here in Arizona and particularly the less populated areas of southern Arizona. So let's look at the strongest markets overall. Hawaii had the strongest market. Boom.

And then the West Coast is also in general the strongest EV market followed by the Northeast and then this greater area. And then, so those are the large strong markets.

And then we have isolated urban areas that are kind of grouped throughout the Great Lakes region, once again Chicago, greater Chicago areas is really strong. Florida is really strong for EVs. North Carolina is big, Arizona and Nevada.

And so as I mentioned the industry experts were a bit surprised about the Western half of Arizona and the Southern portion of Nevada coming—looking so strong due to the high prevalence of PV installations and the low carbon intensity electricity.

And also those few states have a high number of EV incentives in that area and West Texas was another surprise. Yes, and West Texas really pops not only because of the cleaner electricity but it has higher gasoline prices for some reason.

You'd like to think all of Texas would have cheaper gasoline prices but for some reason West Texas doesn't. That's the EV market. And so we took these maps and broke them down by state and so how we did that was we ranked each state.

Each state fuel combination according do these four ratings, according to are they the strongest market potential, healthy market potential, patchy market potential or weak market potential.

And how we defined strongest market potential was remember that these are all broken down by 10 by 10 kilometer squares. So, and so in states with the strongest market potential all of these squares if you average them and take the mean of all the scores, it has a very high mean score.

And then if you take the median, but remember the median is the point at which half of the squares have higher value and half of the squares have lower values. So to have the strongest market potential they need to have high mean and median scores.

And essentially what that means is that most of the state will have and that as shown on this example to the right here of New York's electricity market most of the state will have red or yellow with maybe some dark grey squares in it. That's how the strongest market potential is.

And I should point out that the specific breaking point between these four categories. We're a bit subjective but they're documented in the appendix of the report. And then it's a healthy market potential. In general their not quite as good as the strongest markets but they're still uniform.

Meaning that the mean and they median are close to one another. So I'll explain a bit more about that the difference between the mean and median in the patching market potential.

And so the healthy market potential, it needs to surpass a certain percentage of area in the few top quintiles and that depends on the fuel. And for electric vehicles a third of the state needed to be in the stop two quintiles.

For compressed natural gas a half of the state had to be in the top two quintiles and once again that breaking point is documented in the appendix of the report. And then we have the third category, the patchy market potential.

And this includes the states where you'll have like a large urban area with a good market potential or you'll have a strong corridor going through the state. And how these are differentiated from healthy markets are that the mean.

Or sorry the median of all of the squares, the median score of all of the squares is much lower than the mean. And what that difference means is essentially there are some areas that are really high, ranked really high and that's pulling up the mean.

But it's not pulling up the median because most of the squares are a lot lower. And so electric vehicles in Colorado which you can see off to the right here are a good example of a patchy market potential. You can see how the greater Denver area is really strong.

And then a little bit going up the I70 corridor are very strong. You've got that red and yellow and then you also have a lot of areas with the bottom quintile and the second to the bottom quintile represented. So that defines a patchy market potential.

And we made sure that the conglomeration of these squares had to surpass a minimum size for the given fuel. So in other words your market, your strong—your squares of very strong market couldn't be like just spread out and isolated. They had to be clumped together to a certain degree.

And then finally you have the weak market potential and this is different from patchy because the areas of good market are either nonexistent or don't exist in large enough clumps. You might have the same number of like good—squares of good market but they're just kind of spread out and isolated.

So you don't get those synergies of having a substantial market that can support itself and grow itself. And so a summary of the state being summaries.

We have the best states—I should point out that we have this kind of breakdown for every state explaining the market for every fuel in the report but for the purpose of this presentation I'm just going to glance over the best states for alternative fuels in general.

You have, yes, California, you can see these so I will kind of hurry on so we have time for questions and answers but the states most challenging for alternative fuels in general. Wyoming is the most challenging.

So it has weak markets for everything except for compressed natural gas and it has a patchy market for that. And I guess that's the same with Idaho. I should point out that CNG is kind of the savior for a lot of these weaker states.

And now this isn't in the report but I wanted to do a comparison for Clean Cities overlap and this really kind of points out what a great job Clean Cities is doing. So keep in mind that Clean Cities covers 53% of the continental U.S. area.

And so what percent of that top quintile, and remember that top quintile is only 20% of the market. It's the best 20% of the market. What percent of that top quintile is in Clean Cities' territories for different alternative fuels? For ethanol 76% of that top quintile is in a Clean Cities territory.

So that showing that Clean Cities is having a huge impact. For biodiesel you have 70% of the top quintile is in Clean Cities. Propane, 67%. CNG, 65%. And electric vehicles, 61%. So these numbers are really complimentary to the Clean Cities program.

Now I'll move on so in conclusion, indicators of good markets are existing fueling stations, high vehicle density, high gas prices, good state incentives and nearby resources, generally in that order. No state has a weak rating for all alternative fuels.

Compressed natural gas has high potential in the greatest number of states and its particular important in those most challenging states where they have patchy CNG markets and a few of them have nothing else.

California, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania and Washington appear the best states for alternative fuels in general. They had—they all had strong markets for four of the fuels and a healthy market for one of the fuel. And Clean Cities has a disproportionate area of strong alt fuel market in its territory.

So with that I'll open it up to questions and I'd also really like to get your feedback and expansion ideas on follow up work given that we have this framework set up I think we can answer a lot of good questions.

I'd like to get, you know, get some potential questions that we can look into with this framework and the set up and I can also take map requests. If you would like some maps that I showed in the presentation, depending on the number of people that contact me, I can either email them to you.

Or I talked to Trish and we can make them available on the AFDC somewhere. So here's my contact information and let's open it up for questions.

COORDINATOR: And thank you. At this time we will begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question to please press star 1 from your touch tone phone. Please unmute your line and record your name clearly as prompted. And to withdraw your request it is star 2.

Again with questions please press star 1 from your touch tone phone. One moment for the first question. Jeffrey Wisenbaugh your line is open. You may ask your question.

JEFFREY WISENBAUGH: Hi Julie. I was noticing in the slide about the CNG market and the map about the number of stations it listed Iowa as having one CNG station. And we now have six public CNG stations.

And I'm just wondering if I misinterpreted it or if there's a certain frame—time frame that you gathered data on the stations, especially with CNG. I'm sure you're aware of, you know, of kind of how things are picking up. So I was hoping you could address that. Thank you.

CALEY JOHNSON: Yes, that's a good point. This took—data collection was one of the first things that was done in this process by necessity and so this data, let's see the vehicle data was the 2013 pulled vehicle data. The station data, it was taken as a snapshot sometime in 2013 also.

And at this—and I should point out that the gasoline price data that we have is a bit old because 2010 was kind of the most normal gasoline price market. It's been fluctuating wildly, you know, 2008 goes through the roof really abnormal and like 2011 it crashed and was really abnormal.

You know, right now it crashed again and was really abnormal so it's not a good indicator of kind of the inter geographical prices and so that why we decided to stick with 2010 for the gasoline and diesel prices because it's a good, yes, it was just a nice consistent representative year.

But yes, you're larger point is very good in that, you know, this data is all quite time sensitive and so I would definitely like to do an update or at least we could do updates of these component maps and like post them on the AFDC.

I'm not making any promises for when the timing of that would be but it's definitely on my radar screen.

JEFFREY WISENBAUGH: Okay. Thank you.

CALEY JOHNSON: Sure.

COORDINATOR: And thank you. And again as a reminder if you'd like to ask a question it's star 1 from your touch tone phone. I'm showing no further questions at this time.

CALEY JOHNSON: I think I see one on the Web. All right. So Matt Stephens wrote in where AFV conversions factored into this analysis. We have found difficulty pinning down those numbers. No.

So all of the pulled vehicle registration data—well I say no but now I have to backtrack and say partially in that the freight ton miles was a kind of a way to take into account that the demand of fuel—potential demand for fuel for potential alternative fuels.

But when looking at the pulled alternative fuel vehicle data no that didn't take conversions into account because the Polk registration data is based on the vehicle identify number and so that's given at the point of original sale so conversions haven't been taken into account.

Yes, and we've also had difficulty pinning down the number of conversions as well. Okay, I've got another question from Brad. Will today's presentation be available for download? Yes. Yes, I think Sandra can better answer that question than I.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, absolutely. We've recorded the Webinar. You can view it as well as we will post a copy of PDFs of the slides on the Clean Cities Webinar archive pages. So look for that there and feel free to reach out to myself, Sandra Loi or Caley for more information. But absolutely. Yes. So are there any further questions on the phone lines Robin?

COORDINATOR: I'm showing no further questions from the phone lines.

CALEY JOHNSON: All right. Well, I'll put up that final slide of my contact information again and I guess we'll leave it—oh wait I see another one on the Web. From Sydney. It's a blank on. Okay. I guess we're all done.

SANDRA LOI: Okay. Great. If anyone has any further questions don't hesitate to reach out to Caley or myself. Again Caley's information is listed there. And thank you so much for joining us today.

COORDINATOR: And thank you for participating in today's conference. You may disconnect your lines and have a great afternoon.