This report summarizes findings of a review of the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) freight transportation energy consumption forecasting module conducted by IHS Global, Inc. (IHS). EIA contracted with IHS to analyze the relationship between the value of industrial output, physical output, and freight movement in the United States for use in updating analytic assumptions and modeling structure within the NEMS freight transportation module, including forecasting methodologies and processes to identify possible alternative approaches that would improve multi-modal freight flow and fuel consumption estimation. The NEMS freight transportation module estimates freight flows by census division, mode of transportation, and commodity type. NEMS inputs industry output in dollars by census division, commodity group, and mode into the freight transportation module, which reports energy consumption forecasts back into NEMS using these same units of evaluation. NEMS uses nine census divisions, ten aggregated commodity groups, and four modes of transportation: truck, rail, marine (domestic barge and intra-coastal as well as international), and air. Coal moving on rail is modeled separately, as this procedure has proven to improve model accuracy. The primary mechanism of the freight transportation module is a “ton-mile metric” which estimates for each census division, mode, and commodity group the average ton-miles traveled per unit of industrial output. For truck, rail, and domestic marine, this metric is the product of a simple division of base-year industrial output by base-year ton mileage (or modal demand forecasting metric equivalent) reported by various U.S. Government agencies at the national level. This data is disaggregated to the census division and modal level leveraging the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and Census Bureau’s Commodity Flow Survey (CFS). EIA then essentially calculates a simple weighted average from CFS as a proxy for modal and route assignment, which is used to disaggregate national-level commodity flow forecasts into NEMS units.
NEMS Freight Transportation Module Improvement Study
2015
70 pages
Report
No indication
English
Fuel efficiency improvement in rail freight transportation
Tema Archive | 1975
|NO. 1873 - Intermodal Freight Transportation; Freight Transportation Planning
Online Contents | 2004