IMPLEMENTING CALIFORNIA’S LOW CARBON FUELS STANDARD

IMPLEMENTING CALIFORNIA’S LOW CARBON FUELS STANDARD: UC Researchers Deliver on First Phase of Work

Alex Farrell and Dan Sperling

For the last few months, a team of UC researchers led by ITS-Davis’s Dan Sperling and UC Berkeley’s Alex Farrell have been working feverishly to develop recommendations for implementing California’s much-heralded Low Carbon Fuel Standard. The first phase of their work is completed and next steps are being planned.

In late June, the California Air Resources Board (ARB) adopted the LCFS as one of three “early action measures” for implementation under AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. As an early action measure, the LCFS must be in place by 2010. Established under executive order by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the LCFS sets as a goal a minimum 10% reduction in the carbon intensity of California’s transportation fuels by 2020.

The UC researchers have almost completed the second of two comprehensive reports that serve as the foundation for the regulatory process that is now getting underway at ARB. The first study assesses the low carbon fuels options that might be used to meet the proposed standard and presents a number of scenarios for mixes of fuels that might meet a 5, 10, and 15 percent standard. The second study, now under review by stakeholders and others, examines key policy issues associated with the LCFS.

“One of the wonderful outcomes is that UC Davis and UC Berkeley researchers worked together truly as a team. The other is that economists, engineers, environmental researchers and policy analysts transcended the barriers that sometimes exist between their disciplines to work together effectively,” reflects Sperling. The UC Davis team included Mark Delucchi, Anthony Eggert, Jonathan Hughes, Bryan Jenkins, Chris Knittel, Marc Melaina, Joan Ogden, and Chris Yang. In all, 21 UC researchers contributed blood, sweat and tears to the effort.

“It was a very creative process. We were inventing something that no one had ever done before – on an incredibly tight timeframe and with huge implications.”

The UC team’s work was generously funded by the Energy Foundation. Sperling expects the team to continue working on the project—with continued Energy Foundation support—over the next 18 months of ARB’s rulemaking.

The policy report includes 15 initial recommendations, but Sperling notes not all issues are easily resolved. Among the thorny issues are the need for better research on emissions associated with biofuels (especially from conversion of land to biofuel crops), establishing a baseline emission level for all fuels, and determining how to integrate the LCFS with a cap and trade program for refineries and electric utilities.

“Doing this in a way that keeps the policy as simple, transparent, and incentive-based as possible, is critically important and a huge challenge,” Sperling adds.

Sperling cites numerous lessons from the experience so far. “Transferring even the most elegant research into regulation and law is tremendously challenging. Accommodating the real world of unique circumstances, data limitations, and demands for equitable treatment is difficult.”

He adds that the LCFS is one of those few policies that really can have a transforming effect. In fact, that is the goal – to transform the energy industries into low-carbon fuel suppliers.