Port Emissions Inventory Guidance
EPA's Port Emissions Inventory Guidance provides methodologies on how to develop port-related and goods movement emissions inventories. This guidance has specific information on how to develop inventories for criteria pollutants and precursors, climate-related pollutants, mobile source air toxics, and energy consumption. This guidance also describes the latest, state-of-the-science methodologies for preparing an emissions inventory in the following mobile source sectors: ocean-going vessels, harbor craft, recreational marine, cargo handling equipment, onroad vehicles, and rail.
The Port Emissions Inventory Guidance is intended to help port authorities and other port operators, state and local governments, Tribes, those doing business at ports (such as terminal operators, tenants, and shipping companies), local communities, and other stakeholders who want to prepare mobile source emission inventories for regulatory, voluntary, and research purposes. Regulatory purposes include inventory developed for inclusion in state implementation plans (SIPs), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses, transportation conformity determinations, or general conformity evaluations, among others. The methodologies are broadly applicable to all types of ports, including seaports, Great Lakes ports, and river ports, as well as railyards, freight terminals, intermodal facilities, freight corridors, and other types of facilities that handle and move goods.
October 2023 Note: The April 2022 version of this guidance based on MOVES3 generally continues to apply for MOVES4, with the exception of new guidance for the AVFT fuels input found in the MOVES4 Technical Guidance: Using MOVES to Prepare Emission Inventories for State Implementation Plans and Transportation Conformity (pdf) (1.3 MB, August 2023, EPA-420-B-23-011) . Please refer to Section 4.8.3 of the MOVES4 Technical Guidance for this input. Section 4.8 of the MOVES4 Technical Guidance includes more information about the Fuels inputs in general that may be helpful when creating a port emissions inventory.
For more information and background on the guidance and development process, please visit Ports and Goods Movement Emissions Inventories on the EPA Ports Initiative website.
The full guidance document and downloadable data tables can be accessed below:
- Port Emissions Inventory Guidance: Methodologies for Estimating Port-Related and Goods Movement Mobile Source Emissions (pdf) (2.5 MB, April 2022, EPA-420-B-22-011)
This guidance describes the latest, state-of-the-science methodologies for preparing an emissions inventory for the following mobile source sectors: ocean-going vessels, harbor craft, recreational marine, cargo handling equipment, onroad vehicles, and rail.The April 2022 version is based on the September 2020 version and supersedes it. The following aspects have changed:
- NOx emission factors for auxiliary engines of C3 vessels operating with fuel type marine gas oil/marine diesel oil have been updated in Table 3.5. (The medium-speed and high-speed diesel engine type numbers had been inadvertently reversed in the September 2020 version).
- New guidance about accounting for ocean-going vessels with Tier III propulsion engines operating at low loads (see Section 3.5.1; new guidance found after Table 3.5).
- Update to Table 3.11, defining ocean-going vessel transit mode as speeds greater than 1 knot (instead of 3 knots), based on EPA’s experience since the previous guidance was issued.
- Minor updates to reflect EPA’s MOVES3 model; most of these are in Section 7, Onroad Vehicles.
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Port Emissions Inventory Guidance: Downloadable Data Tables (April 2022) (zip)
To help inventory preparers use these, each data table in the guidance is available in comma-separated values (.csv) format in the ZIP file noted above.
Other Materials
Port Emission Inventory Guidance – Public Webinar Slides (October 2020)
This webinar, held on October 29, 2020, covered the methodologies described in the guidance to prepare a port-related emissions inventory for landside and waterside emissions across six port-related sectors: ocean going vessels, harbor craft, recreational marine, cargo handling equipment, onroad vehicles, and rail. The webinar covered the data inputs, methods, and analysis approaches available for developing base year and future year inventories of varying levels of detail and geographic scopes based on user capacity, available resources, and intended end use of the inventory.