Using National Emissions Inventory Data

ERG experts offer practical tools and tips for making informed decisions about VW settlement project funding.

The best map in the world is useless if you don’t know where you are.

We’ve talked to a lot of you about how to fund projects with your VW settlement monies. And many of you have expressed exactly this concern, if not in quite these words.

If you’re trying to reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, you need to know where they’re coming from.

We’ve developed a tool—which we’ve affectionately dubbed “Stanley”—to help you do just that.

Stanley uses data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) National Emissions Inventory (NEI) to highlight the categories of mobile source emissions that are producing the highest levels of NOx emissions. You can use Stanley to break out NEI data by sector, pollutant, and county. Here’s a sample from South Carolina, showing NOx emissions by sector.

The biggest culprits in the Palmetto state are non-diesel light-duty vehicles and diesel heavy-duty vehicles, which together account for about two-thirds of all mobile NOx emissions.

You can also cross-reference the data, as the chart below shows.

Here you see the top five NOx-producing counties, with each county’s emissions broken out by sector.

You don’t actually need Stanley to get these data — it’s all readily available on EPA’s website. But those of you who’ve played around with NEI know that the raw data can be a little challenging to manipulate. Stanley wraps a friendlier user interface around the data.

We’ll be talking about Stanley at the Southeast Diesel Collaborative’s annual meeting in September. If you’re going, be sure to stop and say hi. If you’re interested but can’t make the meeting, drop us a line.