PNNL

Clearing the path for critical infrastructure

For over 50 years, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has required agencies to conduct environmental reviews and document the potential impacts of proposed actions. However, these important documents must be collected from a range of sources, making the process time-consuming and costly. 

What is PermitAI^TM?

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is building PermitAI™, a combined one-stop data platform and powerful suite of robust AI tools, to streamline and accelerate the review process for critical federal infrastructure. Using PermitAI™, agencies preparing environmental impact documentation can quickly and easily access important data in one place. The tool can also help agencies better review public comments and make more informed decisions.

• PermitAI™’s testbed is equipped with specialized large language models and a vast repository of historical environmental review data.
• PermitAI™’s tools like SearchNEPA, EngageNEPA, and CommentNEPA will enable local, state, and federal agencies to make faster, more informed permitting decisions, reducing delays and costs.

The PermitAI™ project is funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Policy and Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. 

How can AI streamline environmental permitting?

Leveraging the expertise of the Department of Energy and national laboratories, PNNL is leading the way in developing trusted AI tools to improve environmental reviews and permitting across the federal government.

The foundation of PermitAI™ is a comprehensive dataset of past environmental reviews and permitting documents containing millions of pages and billions of words. Building on this dataset, PNNL is testing AI-powered applications focused on accelerating individual tasks and workflows. Users of these applications can do the following and more:

• Instantly recall and reference relevant federal environmental reviews (e.g., environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, and categorical exclusions) in new projects and provide summaries of key conclusions and data from those reviews
• Rapidly discover, evaluate, and compare specific data that would be difficult or even impossible to locate through traditional research methods
• Automate rote, repetitive workflows in the following ways:
  • Performing an initial review of correspondences and categorization of comments (e.g., from the public, other federal agencies, Tribal leaders, and industry), allowing subject matter experts to begin addressing the substance of comments as soon as they are received
  • Importing data from an applicant’s documentation into an environmental impact statement or environmental assessment and citing that documentation to expedite drafting and confirmatory analyses
  • Finding and highlighting apparent inconsistencies in data points or writing styles across different sections of a document.

How PermitAI™ applies AI to the permit review process

Data collection, enrichment, management, and governance

PermitAI™ is creating standardized data to improve quality and access. This includes building connections for NEPA data, including data on projects, processes, documents, and public involvement as well as comments and geographic information system records.

AI model development and evaluation

Using large language models to analyze thousands of environmental review documents, like categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, and environmental impact statements, can boost efficiency. This method can help to uncover trends, create a detailed map, and catalog all NEPA efforts.

NEPA Application Development and Deployment

The PermitAI™ team offers safe and reliable support to NEPA experts and users in government agencies, academia, Tribal governments, and the public for developing and evaluating permitting tools and applications.

Contact Us

Have questions about PermitAI™? Want to share your work in this space? Email us at permitai@pnnl.gov with questions, feedback, or general inquiries.