Associated Press/Gene J. Puskar - In this Nov. 19, 2012 photo, Waste Management driver Alan Sadler fills his truck with CNG gas at the company's filling station in Washington, Pa. Years from now, motorists
SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — If the trash truck or bus rolling down your street seems a little quieter these days, you're not imagining things. It's probably running on natural gasSurging gas production has led the drilling industry to seek out new markets for its product, and energy companies, increasingly, are setting their sights on the transportation sector.
Touting natural gas as a cheaper, cleaner-burning
alternative to gasoline and diesel, drillers, public utilities and government
officials are trying to boost demand for natural gas buses, taxis, shuttles,
delivery trucks and heavy-duty work vehicles of all sorts, while simultaneously
encouraging development of the fueling infrastructure that will be needed to
keep them running.
The economics are compelling. Natural gas costs about
$1.50 to $2 per gallon equivalent less than gasoline and diesel. That can add up
to tens of thousands of dollars in savings for vehicles that guzzle the most
fuel.
Fleet managers are taking notice.
Companies as diverse as AT&T, Waste Management and UPS are converting all or
parts of their fleets to natural gas, as are transit agencies,
municipalities and state governments.
"Now that you can save a dollar or two dollars a gallon, there's huge interest in the market, especially in those fleets that use a lot of fuel," said Richard Kolodziej, president of the trade group Natural Gas Vehicles for America.
Waste Management, the nation's largest
trash hauler, has committed to replacing 80 percent of its fleet with trucks
powered by natural
gas. Rich Mogan, the company's district manager in southwestern
Pennsylvania, said about half of his fleet of 100 trucks now run on the cheaper
fuel. They are quieter and less expensive to maintain, he said, and "we are
looking at a 50 percent reduction in our (fuel) cost."
Driller EQT Corp. opened its own natural gas filling
station outside Pittsburgh in summer 2011, using it to refuel its trucks while
also making it available to the public. It's now doing about 1,000 fill-ups a
month — and only half involve EQT vehicles. Other users include City of
Pittsburgh trash trucks, shuttles run by the University of Pittsburgh Medical
Center, a taxi service and a handful of consumers.
EQT wasn't sure how the station would be
received.
"We didn't have commitments at all beyond
our own vehicles. It was really a guess of what we think we could do," said
David Ross, an EQT vice president focused on market development. "We had people
who, at the beginning, said, 'No, we're not interested.' Today they actually own
a vehicle that's natural
gas. I think having the physical asset sitting there has helped it become
real for people."
Natural gas vehicles aren't new. But the
drilling boom — spurred by new technology that unlocked vast reserves of natural gas in deep rock
formations like the Marcellus Shale underneath parts of New York, Pennsylvania,
West Virginia and Ohio — created a gas glut that depressed prices. That, in
turn, has made natural
gas more attractive as a transportation fuel.
Partly because of a lack of fueling
infrastructure, gas isn't expected to grab significant market share from
petroleum anytime soon. Only a tenth of 1 percent of the natural gas consumed in
the Unites States last year was used as vehicle fuel, according to the U.S.
Department of Energy. Of more than 250 million vehicles on the road today,
perhaps 125,000 are powered by natural gas.
But energy companies see
potential.
Chesapeake Energy Corp., the nation's No.
2 producer, has been especially aggressive about targeting transportation. The
Oklahoma City-based driller invested $150 million in Clean Energy, a company
backed by Texas investor T. Boone Pickens that's building a nationwide network
of liquefied natural gas refueling stations for long-haul truckers. Chesapeake
also teamed up with General Electric on "CNG In A Box," a compressed natural gas
fueling system for retailers; announced a partnership with GE and Whirlpool to
develop a $500 appliance that would allow consumers to refuel their natural
gas-powered cars at home; and has been working with 3M to design less expensive
tanks.
"It's simply a matter of time before the
U.S. meaningfully shifts from transportation systems built around consuming
high-priced oil to consuming low-priced domestic natural gas," Chesapeake CEO Aubrey
McClendon wrote to investors this year.
States are also promoting natural gas as a
transportation fuel. Nearly two dozen state governments have formed a consortium
to add natural gas-powered vehicles to their fleets, an effort launched by the
governors of Oklahoma and Colorado that attracted more than 100 bids from
dealerships last month.
Separately, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is dangling $20 million worth of incentives to goose the market for medium- and heavy-duty natural gas vehicles. The three-year program, which launches Dec. 1 and is funded by a state fee on drillers, aims at putting 600 to 700 new natural gas-powered trucks and buses on the road in its first year.
State officials also hope to use the
grant program to spur a network of new filling stations. Pennsylvania has only
14 publicly available stations, and more places to fill up could help stoke
consumer demand.
"The big prize here is to get consumers purchasing vehicles that run off natural gas," said Geoff Bristow of the Pennsylvania DEP.
Industry officials, though, acknowledge that's a long way off.
Conventional gasoline engines are
becoming more efficient, and consumers might balk at spending more on a natural
gas-powered car. Plus, the United States has less than 600 natural gas filling
stations available to the public, compared with 160,000 gas stations.
The only factory-made, natural
gas-powered passenger car available to U.S. consumers is the Honda Civic Natural
Gas. While Honda expects sales to top 2,000 this year, that's a fraction of the
number of gasoline-powered Civics it moves in a single month.
Analyst Mike Omotoso of research firm LMC Automotive sees natural gas as a niche transportation fuel.
"There is very little interest in natural
gas for cars," Omotoso said. "People looking for alternatives are looking at
hybrids and electric vehicles."
For now, the gas industry is
concentrating on heavy trucks and buses, vehicles that ply a regular route and
return to the same base to fill up.
But both Kolodziej and Norman Herrera,
Chesapeake's director of market development, see a future where natural
gas-powered cars and SUVs are commonplace and "you have a market like transit
and trash, where all the pieces are in place and all the bottlenecks have been
resolved," Herrera said.
1 comment:
i really enjoyed this information. It is very informative post..
Taxi from Philadelphia Airport
Post a Comment