NEPA by the Numbers

Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and data scientist Kasey Zapatka partnered to analyze the National Environmental Policy Act Text Corpus (NEPATEC) 2.0 dataset collated by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s PermitAI project, the largest publicly available dataset of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) documents, including categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, and environmental impact statements. The NEPATEC 2.0 dataset standardizes and categorizes data across many of these documents for the first time, making them accessible for analysis. In this report, we investigate how NEPA functions across a range of federal actions involving energy infrastructure.

Given the historically limited amount of publicly available data on NEPA and its impact on project outcomes, our analysis of this new dataset sheds light on important trends in agency use of different types of NEPA documents and the initial effects of recent statutory reforms. This report summarizes our first phase of results from a planned series analyzing this new NEPA data corpus.