(PermitAI: Richland, Washington) -- For the first time in the more than 50-year history of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), federal regulators now have vital information at their fingertips in a single database, thanks to an ambitious project called PermitAI, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

Previously, NEPA review data resided in siloed federal computer systems, often in document formats that modern data-crunching methods, such as artificial intelligence, can’t easily process. 

The research team at PNNL addressed the silo problem by utilizing an advanced, custom AI algorithm trained to recognize and categorize data automatically. Once processed, the machine-readable dataset, known as NEPA Text Corpus (NEPATEC), makes the labor-intensive searches much simpler. The PermitAI team has now released its AI-ready, open-access NEPATEC 2.0 database to the public.

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