Vehicle-Cycle Inventory for Type C School Buses & Intra-City Transit Buses

Technical Report · Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 EDT 2025

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/3012136· OSTI ID:3012136

Pandey, Ramsharan ^[1]; Iyer, Rakesh Krishnamoorthy ^[1]; Kelly, Jarod C. ^[1]

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1. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)

This report documents the new inventory incorporated into the Research and Development version of Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (R&D GREET) 2025 model for the vehicle cycle of Type C school buses and intracity transit buses. The transportation sector contributes significantly to the United States’ energy consumption and resultant emissions (EPA, 2025a). However, public transit plays an important role in mitigating these impacts because it consumes a relatively low amount of energy per passenger (Congressional Budget Office, 2022). Public transit is widely used in the United States; more than 500,000 school buses (EPA, 2025b) and ~75,000 service buses (American Public Transportation Association, 2025) operate in the nation. These are primarily internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) powered by diesel. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are making efforts to electrify U.S. bus fleets by using batteries as a propulsion system to replace internal combustion engines. Electrification can reduce tailpipe emissions, such as particulate matter (with a diameter ≤10 µm [PM₁₀] and with a diameter ≤2.5 µm [PM_2.5]) and nitrogen oxides (Jonas et al., 2025; Martinez and Samaras, 2024; EPA, 2025b; Wayne et al., 2009). Hence, any energy and emission impact analysis of public transit must consider both conventional ICEVs and upcoming electric vehicle (EV) options for the school and transit buses that dominate this landscape. To understand the detailed environmental impact profiles of ICEV and EV school and transit buses, it is necessary to conduct a thorough analysis covering both vehicle manufacturing and vehicle use stages. The current literature lacks a detailed vehicle-cycle inventory for school and transit buses, which makes this kind of comparison difficult. To overcome this gap, we developed a comprehensive vehicle-cycle model for school and transit buses in Argonne’s R&D GREET 2025 model. The model is flexible in handling user inputs for key assumptions, such as component weights and material compositions, upstream energy sources for material processing, and vehicle operating parameters, to understand their impacts on energy use and emissions for both school and transit buses. This report is organized as follows: Section 2 provides details on the modeling approach and vehicle specifications (weights and composition of different vehicle components, and vehicle operating parameters) for both school and transit buses. Section 3 provides details on vehicle assembly, disposal, and recycling (ADR) approaches for the two buses. Section 4 includes details about their incorporation into the R&D GREET model.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Office of Sustainable Transportation. Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 3012136
• Report Number(s): ANL/ESIA--25/17; 200218
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS