New Report on Groundbreaking Pilot Program Points to Carbon Sequestration Potential
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) established the Carbon Sequestration Pilot Program (CSPP) in 2008 to assess how much carbon could be sequestered by native vegetation in National Highway System (NHS) right-of-way (ROW). FHWA asked the Volpe Center's Multimodal Systems Research and Analysis Center of Innovation to assist with this effort.
Recently, FHWA and the Volpe Center released their joint report, "Estimated Land Available for Carbon Sequestration in the National Highway System." The project team used Geographic Information Systems to analyze aerial images, detailed state DOT maps and ROW plans to estimate that the NHS includes about 5 million acres of land. This acreage total is the first known data-based estimate for highway ROW acreage for both individual states and the nation.
The project team estimates that vegetation in the NHS ROW has already sequestered 91 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon and that it continues to sequester approximately 3.6 MMT per year nationwide, or the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions from about 2.6 million passenger cars. Using a hypothetical price of $20 per metric ton, the total potential sequestration value of the nation's highway ROW is $8.5 to $14 billion nationwide. As part of the overall project, the Volpe Center and FHWA also developed a Highway Carbon Sequestration Estimator as a decision-support tool to help state DOTs assess the return on investment for various carbon sequestration scenarios. The report is available online, and the decision-support tool is available upon request.
