Freight Rail Decarbonization Project Receives $1.5 Million from Energy Department

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $1.5 million in funding to a NC State Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering project focused on freight rail decarbonization. 

The Multi-Decadal Decarbonization Pathway for U.S. Freight Rail program received the Lowering CO2: Models to Optimize Train Infrastructure, Vehicles, and Energy Storage (LOCOMOTIVES) funding award. The Energy Department’s Office of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy selects innovative and unconventional projects about energy technology for funding.

With the funding, the Multi-Decadal Decarbonization Pathway for U.S. Freight Rail project will research low-carbon energy storage systems to ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emission in the rail freight sector. NC State researchers will develop an open-source software tool to account for train dynamics, energy storage and delivery, multi-train interactions and other measures; they will then use the tool on a national sample of rail corridors. 

“It’s very exciting to receive this award and to start developing tools to decarbonize the freight rail industry,” said George List, the project’s principal investigator. “This work is vital to reshaping how energy is used in the industry and making transportation more sustainable.”

This post was originally published in Office of Research and Innovation.