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The Environmental Protection Agency, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and California Air Resources Board released the joint mid-term Technical Assessment Review of the light-duty GHG standards in July of 2016. The review generally asserted that the GHG standards adopted in calendar year 2012 for 2022-2025 model year vehicles were feasible. Although many different technologies were evaluated, the review did not assess the benefits of high compression ratio engines enabled by a high-octane low carbon fuel. This study fills in the gap in the Technical Assessment Review by examining the impacts of a 98-research octane number gasoline-ethanol blend with 25 percent ethanol. We find that this fuel would enable higher compression ratios to improve tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions by about 6 percent on most engines.

Fundamental to the concept of “sustainable development” is the belief that environmental improvement and economic development are intertwined - that one cannot succeed without the other. From a sustainable development perspective, assessing the economic impact of future standards is as important as evaluating the technological feasibility of achieving those standards. TO determine the potential economic impacts of possible future fuel economy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards, assumptions must be made about technology costs, discount rate, retail price markup, customer willingness to pay, rebound rate and other factors. This paper examines the assumptions used by government agencies and how changes to these assumptions impact the viability of possible post-2016 model year (MY) standards.