PermitAI Releases Geo-Enriched NEPA Database and Live Federal Permitting Toolkit

The PermitAI team at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has released two public resources that combine historical National Environmental Policy Act records with live federal permitting data, creating a more complete view of the environmental review process. The upgrades cover both archived decision documents and current government data sources, giving researchers, agency officials and industry users a faster way to analyze how federal permitting decisions are made and how proposed projects may interact with surrounding landscapes. At the center of the release is NEPA Text Corpus 3.0, a substantially expanded database of NEPA environmental review documents. The dataset now includes 188,000 documents and more than 30 text and image metadata types, growing from 140,000 documents and 14 metadata categories in the prior version. For the first time, NEPATEC3.0 also includes rich geospatial content: more than 630,000 map images and 135,000 GeoTIFF files, making it the largest publicly available geo-enriched repository of NEPA review documents. The added visual and location-based layers allow users to discover permitting records by geography, compare project contexts, and combine environmental review data with other spatial datasets. The team said the update reflects the fundamentally spatial nature of permitting and creates new opportunities for vision-language models and geospatial analysis to support faster, more precise review. The second resource, the NEPA Model Context Protocol toolkit, extends access beyond archived documents to live federal data. Fully open source, NEPA-MCP connects users to more than 20 authoritative government sources through a single interface. It provides access to 23 MCP servers and 56 tools, each tied to a specific federal agency or data source. The toolkit supplies standardized, contextualized information on current federal reviews, legal jurisdiction, water, wildlife habitat and other environmental resources relevant to a proposed project area. By replacing scattered raw-data queries with modular, ready-to-use connections, NEPA-MCP is designed to streamline workflow integration and support agentic or large-language-model applications. PermitAI has developed the resources through a series of public and private partnerships. The team has worked with the federal Council on Environmental Quality to build a standard framework for NEPATEC3.0 and provide data services to CEQ initiatives through NEPA-MCP. Earlier in 2026, the team reported results from a collaboration with OpenAI that used coding agents to reduce repetitive drafting work in environmental reviews. The project also partnered with PNNL’s Center for Continuum Computing and Google to enrich and store data on the Google Cloud Platform, improving sharing and scalability. PermitAI is currently working with the Permitting Council to broaden adoption of its data tools. The initiative began as a pilot sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Policy to centralize NEPA decision data for DOE. It expanded as federal priorities shifted toward accelerating environmental reviews and adopting uniform data standards, including efforts tied to America’s AI Action Plan and a CEQ directive for federal agencies. By publishing historical permitting records and live data access in parallel, PermitAI aims to make an often complex environmental review process more transparent, comparable and useful for both public understanding and practical project planning.