Half the Oil? UCS looks at driving down petroleum usage on the US West Coast

Key findings

The full implementation of existing transportation policies (e.g., fuel economy and tailpipe greenhouse gas reduction standards) will yield petroleum reductions of 24 percent in California, and 8 percent in Oregon and Washington by 2030 compared to consumption levels in 2015. However, the majority of these policies have requirements that will plateau well before 2030, thereby providing opportunity for further petroleum reductions by 2030 by simply extending existing policies.

Extending and, in some cases, accelerating strategies employed today offers a pathway to achieve the HtO target. Strategies like sustainable community planning, improved vehicle efficiency, and alternative fuel deployment (e.g., via low carbon fuel policies) minimize dependence on aggressive technological breakthroughs or drastic shifts in how people travel.

The HtO Pathway also underscores that achieving the HtO target is more than simply “staying the course”; the pathway highlights the importance of implementing strategies as soon as possible to help achieve the 2030 target, thereby relieving pressure on technological advances or breakthroughs in one particular area or another.

Furthermore, while the strategies in the HtO Pathway are similar to those in place today, they are not employed in all three states uniformly. For instance, Washington does not have an enforceable policy to promote alternative fuels such as a low carbon fuel standard or a zero emission vehicle program. As a result, it will be more challenging to achieve the HtO target in Washington than in states with such policies.

The other cases in our analysis demonstrate that relying on a limited subset of strategies is unlikely to achieve a 50 percent petroleum reduction target. While the analysis was constrained based on existing research, these other cases push the upper bound of what may be achievable by 2030. In one regard, they illustrate that faster deployment of alternative fuels and electric vehicles, for example, can provide additional assurances that a HtO target can be achieved or exceeded; on the other hand, they can serve as a cautionary note of relying too heavily on a singular category of strategies given the higher uncertainty that these reductions would be achieved.