CoST (Control Strategy Tool)

Brief Description

CoST (Control Strategy Tool) allows users to estimate the emission reductions and costs associated with future-year control scenarios, and then to generate emission inventories with the control scenarios applied. CoST is a component of the Emissions Modeling Framework (EMF), which is currently used by EPA to solve many of the long-standing complexities of emissions modeling. Emissions modeling is the process by which emissions inventories and other related information are converted to hourly, gridded, chemically speciated emissions suitable for input to an air quality model. The EMF supports the management and quality assurance of emissions inventories and emissions modeling-related data, and also the running of SMOKE to develop air quality model inputs.

Purpose:

CoST was developed primarily for performing Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) for National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). As part of the RIA development process, CoST allows EPA to identify additional emissions controls that could be applied by states and EPA to bring areas into attainment, and to estimate the emissions reductions and costs of these additional controls.

Features:

• CoST tracks information about control measures, their costs, and the types of emissions sources to which they apply.
• Supports preparation and analysis of future year emissions control strategies for point (primarily non-EGU), area, and mobile sources.
• CoST is built on top of Control Measures Database (CMDB), a database of current information about control technologies and practices that are available to reduce emissions, the source categories to which they apply, the expected control efficiencies, and their estimated costs.
• CoST is an extensible software system that provides several types of algorithms for developing control strategies:
  • Maximum Emissions Reduction
  • Multi-Pollutant Maximum Emissions Reduction
  • Least Cost
  • Least Cost Curve

Control strategy results can be exported to comma-separated-values (CSV) files, SMOKE-formatted inventory files, Google Earth-compatible (.kmz) files, or Shapefiles. The results can also be viewed in a graphical table that supports sorting, filtering, and plotting.

CoST is a component of the U.S. EPA's Emissions Modeling Framework (EMF), a client-server Java application and a PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) database that stores information related to emissions modeling, including emissions inventory datasets and the CMDB.

CoST reports the emissions reductions and costs associated with the co-impacts of a selected group of control measures on other pollutants.