PermitAI™: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Environmental Reviews and Permitting
Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT
🔗 Click here to register
Join us for a National Lab Discovery Series webinar featuring PermitAI™, an emerging artificial intelligence (AI) platform developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to help streamline and accelerate the environmental review process for federal infrastructure projects.
For more than 50 years, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has required federal agencies to conduct environmental reviews and document the potential impacts of proposed actions. These reviews are essential for informed decision-making, but the information needed to complete them is often collected from many different sources, making the process time-consuming and complex.
PermitAI™ combines a comprehensive dataset of historical environmental review documents with specialized AI tools designed to help users locate relevant information faster, analyze environmental review data more efficiently, and support more informed permitting decisions. The team is also engaging with government users, technology developers, and potential commercialization partners to evaluate and advance these capabilities.
During this session, PNNL researchers will explore how AI tools such as SearchNEPA, ChatNEPA, CommentNEPA, WriteNEPA and EngageNEPA are being developed to help agencies conduct environmental reviews and manage permitting workflows more effectively.
What You’ll Learn:
- Learn how AI tools are being developed to support environmental reviews and permitting workflows
- Discover how large datasets of environmental review documents can help locate relevant analyses and summarize key findings
- Explore opportunities to participate in testing and evaluation of emerging permitting tools
- Learn about partnership and licensing opportunities for organizations interested in deploying AI-enabled permitting solutions
- Engage directly with PNNL researchers during a live Q&A
Who Should Join:
- Federal, state, and local agencies involved in environmental reviews and permitting
- Infrastructure developers and environmental consulting firms navigating NEPA processes
- Technology companies and AI developers building tools for government workflows
- GovTech companies and software providers interested in partnering to deploy permitting solutions
- Researchers and organizations working on AI benchmarking, evaluation, and data standards
Featured Speaker: Sameera Horawalavithana
Sameera Horawalavithana is a senior data scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and a researcher of natural language processing (NLP) and large multimodal models development and evaluation. He is the principal investigator for the PermitAI™ project that gained national visibility as a spotlight project in America’s AI Action Plan and the White House Permitting Innovation Center. He authored more than 40 peer reviewed papers (Google Scholar), including publications at premier AI conferences and workshops such as NeurIPS, ACL, TheWebConf, and WebSci. He also serves as an Associate Editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Artificial Intelligence journal and Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Moderator: Bethel Tarekegne
Bethel Tarekegne is a Senior Energy Researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where she leads the Energy Transitions Planning team and manages PermitAI, an initiative using AI to streamline environmental review and permitting processes across federal and state levels. Drawing on an interdisciplinary background spanning electrical engineering, environmental policy, and energy systems, her research integrates energy system planning, policy analysis, and collaborative decision-making to accelerate energy infrastructure deployment, with a strong emphasis on grid modernization, electrification, and inclusive approaches to infrastructure development. Bethel is a widely published researcher across these domains and has served as Associate Editor for Energy Research & Social Science and Guest Editor for IEEE Power & Energy Magazine.