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More U.S. Towns Are Requiring Natural Gas Garbage Fleets, in Boon to Truck Makers
Five years ago, when the Long Island town of Smithtown passed a law requiring its garbage and recycling collectors to ditch their diesel haulers for trucks run on compressed natural gas (CNG), it was seen as a surprising step.
At the time, only two of the nation's truck builders—Autocar in Indiana and Oklahoma's Crane Carrier Company—were making natural gas trash trucks. And virtually all their orders went to towns in Southern California, which had switched to CNG years before.
"It was a very bold decision. No one had done it on the East Coast," said Joanna Underwood, president of Energy Vision, a research organization that gave Smithtown guidance on its mandate. "None of the haulers on Long Island had ever used a natural gas truck—or practically had ever seen one."
Today, Long Island has more than 100 CNG haulers, as municipalities throughout the New York area have followed Smithtown's lead. Industry leaders say these ordinances—which have also spread nationwide—have stoked demand for natural gas trucks and helped encourage nearly every waste truck maker in America to develop a CNG model.
Jeffry Swertfeger of McNeilus Truck and Manufacturing in Minnesota, a leading manufacturer, said his firm began making CNG sanitation trucks in 2006, after demand rose "astronomically." He credited laws like Smithtown's with providing "a huge benefit.
"We now have fleets who have made it very clear that they are working toward 100 percent CNG products in the future," he said.
Veteran CNG truck builder Autocar now supplies over half of Smithtown's 22 trash and recycling trucks. (Crane Carrier supplies the rest.) This year, two-thirds of the 2,100 waste collection trucks it will roll out will be CNG—up from a quarter just three years ago.
"There is no significant [waste] hauler in the country that has not either switched or investigated switching to natural gas," said Tom Vatter, Autocar's vice president of sales and marketing. "If they're not looking at natural gas, then they're really not connected to what is going on."
Compressed natural gas is composed mostly of methane and runs in converted internal combustion engines. Advocates champion the fuel for its environmental benefits and low costs. The cars release 25 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than diesel and far fewer emissions of toxic pollutants. A gallon of CNG is about half the cost of a gallon of diesel, saving fleets thousands in fuel costs.
But some clean car supporters are skeptical about CNG, due to the boom in shale gas drilling and the accompanying process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The controversial practice has increased from 1 percent of U.S. gas production in 2000 to about 15 percent today. Residents across gas country have blamed it for seeping toxic fluids into their drinking water supplies.
John Cross, a federal transportation advocate at Environment America, said his group won't support natural gas trucks unless and until fracking is proven as safe as drillers say it is. "[Fracking] creates a lot of enormous obstacles to natural gas becoming an effective alternative to oil."
Soaring Diesel Costs a Major Factor
For Smithtown, a town of 118,000 people some 35 miles from New York City, the decision to swap its fleet of diesel sanitation trucks for CNG came in 2006, while it was preparing to solicit bids for contracts with local garbage and recycling firms.
The weak economy was pushing officials to find new ways to cut costs. That year the price of diesel fuel was almost ten times what it was a decade earlier, and rising.
Historically, diesel has cost less per-gallon than gasoline. But strong demand from big diesel consumers like Europe and China—plus higher production costs as a result of U.S. EPA restrictions on diesel pollutants—have helped push the fuel prices to has high as $4 per gallon today.
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Comments
Is "Requiring" specific fuels good policy? Yes if you're CNG!
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on October 24, 2011 - 10:48am.
It's deja vu all over again. Rewind to 2000 -- it's the natural gas industry and its long Time advocates (INFORM and now Energy Vision) trying to spiff the story of mandating markets and taking their green and red-white and blue colored whip to pressure near-bankrupt muncipalities suffering through the recession and cutting government services to require their product and help subsidize it.
The natural gas industry hasn't learned but should follow the "build it and they will come" protocol. If natural gas is such a good thing then let them build and install their fuel station technology with their own $$$$ and compete on a level playing field.
What audacity to be looking for big government handouts at a time when many municipalities are cutting backservices and people not to mention the frequency of trash collections to meet payrolls.
Natural gassers have fueled up the hooopla based on assured access to shale gas and the economic per gallon equivalent cost advantage over diesel. Does anyone believe that fracking regulations won't add cost and complexity that might interrupt the Pickens Plan utopian implementation of "cheap affordable domestic fuel" ?
Since this is ostensibly a climate publication, why no mention of the greenhouse gas impacts from CNG from Yale that question whether CNG is really good climate policy -- with escaping Methane factored into the climate impact equation.
There's no emissions advantage to natural gas any longer over diesel. And the cost per truck might be coming down but the elephant in the service bay is the cost of pipelines and compressing-- withouth that you have no gas, and that is where the big bucks are.
CNG isn't the only home-grown fuel game in town. Many transit and municipal governments who want to "do better" and use more domestically produced fuel are finding a friend in 20 percent biodiesel blends into existing diesel engines. No big infrastructure investments and ALL existing vehicles use it not just the few expensive ones that run on the different fuel.
Municipalities have a hard job these days providing services in a shrinking economy. Selling them a bill of promises on a big fuel switch to CNG or any fuel for that matter seems like the wrong thing to do.
Climate change, its causes
Submitted by Tim L (not verified) on October 24, 2011 - 4:43pm.
Climate change, its causes and the remedies, should always be part of articles in “Inside Climate News” when fossil fuels are mentioned. Fossil fuel use has brought us to a tipping point in global warming, at which positive feedbacks dominate, warming the earth even further, such as through increased water vapor in the air, melting of frozen methane in tundra and polar seas, and alteration of deep ocean currents to cause more methane release from ocean sediment. Global warming will be the mother of all disasters for 100s and 1000s of years, perhaps millions, perhaps forever. Stopping fossil fuel use is the way of survival.
Recent floods in Northeast, severe drought in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest, Spring floods in the Midwest from increased snowpack in the mountains, species migrations and extinction, ocean acidification and coral death are happening, as predicted, as a result of global warming. The costs of these floods and fires and of resettling the environmental refugees should be borne by providers and users of fossil fuel, CNG and diesel included. This would make their prices soar because these economic costs are overwhelming (and then add on the local environmental and health costs!), and thus make alternative fuels and conservation economically competitive. The monetary influence of corporations in Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and at state and local levels is the reason we are still burning so much fossil fuel, conserving so little energy, and producing so few solar panels, windmills, and geothermal systems, in spite of well-understood science that clearly shows we are racing to, and may have already reached, a tipping point where stopping CO2 production may be futile.
The issue that this article discusses, which fuel is better, is trivial. The issue should instead be held up as an example of how the focus of the government and the public becomes so narrowed that one of these fuels looks better than the other, when of course we are using both of them to destroy life on the planet. Who benefits from these controversies? It should be alternative fuels, conservation, etc, but it ends up being fossil fuel corporations, the Dick Cheneys and George Bushes of the world, no matter how it falls out.
finding a sustainable fuel for transportation- CNG is a path!
Submitted by joannaunderwood (not verified) on November 4, 2011 - 8:49pm.
I would like to discuss the variety of points made by your anonymous letter writer who wrote on Oct 24 under the title "Is requiring certain fuels good Policy: Yes if it's CNG!"
Energy Vision, a national non profit environmental group launched by the team that previously ran INFORM, has been exploring possible fuels for a sustainable future for 20 years. Back in the late l980s, when the EPA and California were all hepped up about methanol, we found it to be a very inefficient fuel since it takes 40% of the energy value of the fuel it is made from to even make it and it contains toxins which are absorbable through the skin. We found, to our own surprise back then, that natural gas - which wasn't even in the conversation - was much cleaner than petroleum, with its one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, and it looked like an interesting option. There were, however, hardly any natural gas vehicles. We realized even then that natural gas was not, in the long run, sustainable, and we explored hydrogen as a possibly sustainable "end game" fuel. We came to appreciate conventional natural gas as a good step in moving toward hydrogen since it required the development of engines that could run on a gas fuel and gas-adapted refueling equipment. We released a report, called Harnessing Hydrogen in 1995 tracing the pathway to hydrogen which would have to be made from water using solar energy.
But many technological and economic obstacles still stand in the way of broad use of hydrogen. After Energy Vision was launched in 2006, our research, fortunately, came upon what now seems to really be the first truly broadly viable sustainable fuel. We call it "biomass gas."
Biomass gas requires no drilling. It is produced by collecting and refining the methane gases that are generated wherever organic wastes are breaking down: in landfills, at sewage treatment plants, on farms, at dairies, etc. Food wastes and other organics can also be processed using a facility called an "anaerobic digestor" In any case, this gas fuel comes from a renewable source, waste, which is available in every city, community and rural area in the country. Because it traps and uses gases that might otherwise escape as powerful climate-changing gases and turns them into a clean fuel, the State of California has branded it, on a life cycle basis, the lowest carbon fuel anywhere. Energy Vision published the first good introduction to this waste-based fuel in a report titled Waste-to-wheels this year. It is on our website (http://www.energy-vision.org)
Biomass gas, also called "biomethane" or "Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), is used commercially in many European countries as a transportation fuel today. But it is just arriving in the US. It can be used, just as conventional natural gas is being used now, in virtually every class of heavy duty truck or bus. These vehicles, (about 10 million of them) now rely on diesel fuel, but for the pleasure of getting the oil to produce diesel, we export about $110 million each and every day!) We could bring that money home and invest it in biomass gas production facilities which can be in all manner of urban and rural setting and which will provide jobs that can never be exported. For municipalities, turning expensive waste burdens into a fuel solution, can be an important plus. Since production of biomass gas fuel is just beginning here, it has made sense to us to encourage a shift from diesel to conventional natural gas for the fuel security, economic and clean air benefits it provides in the near term and, even more, for the engines and refueling infrastructure it requires which will be able to be used for biomass gas in the near future.
Energy Vision's team did not begin its fuels research in the l980s with a commitment to natural gas. We were looking for the best ways to get to sustainable transportation. Even now we keep abreast of ethanol, biodiesel, hybrid and battery technology and fuel cells. Research must continue to explore all possibilities. But so far, natural gas has been the big winner. Were it in conventional or better biomass gas form, it could power all 10 million buses and trucks in this country, and conversion of these big fuel-guzzling vehicles which make up just 4% of all vehicles, would displace 23% of all highway fuel. THAT would be a huge step away from this country's dangerous dependence on oil-based fuel.
It is true, as the anonymous writer mentions, that under EPA's 2010 standards, diesel heavy duty vehicles are now required to meet the same standards as natural gas as it relates to particulate and nitrogen oxide emissions. So the two types of vehicles can be "as clean." today. However, sticking with "clean diesel" never gets you to anything sustainable.
A final point: Petroleum-based fuels were very important for the growth of our transportation systems in the 20th century (arguably better than the 25 million horses that were the backbone of transportation in the 19th century) But knowing what we know about their downsides, we need to get off of them as quickly as we can. The only way to make huge progress toward sustainability RIGHT NOW is the shift of heavy duty fleets to conventional, or much better biomass-based gas! But the deck is stacked for oil because of decades of building the infrastructure, the power of the oil industry and the billions worth of subsidies the industry receives. The one way to give communities and fleets a level playing field is to provide, for an interim period, tax incentives that enable them to pay the higher cost of natural gas vehicles and of installing fueling stations. We support the pending NAT GAS legislation strongly not because we are in cahoots with the natural gas industry but because we care about progress toward sustainability that is in the interest of every community, our country and our planet. At present, we oppose (as the white paper on our website states) further permits for hydrofracking wells until the industry is effectively regulated and totally transparent -- until the public can better evaluate where use of this technology will be safe for our environment and health.
If our research finds (which we hope it will) other fuels or propulsion systems out there that may give us more options in getting where we need to go, we will be the first to get out and say so. For the moment, on the horizon is one road forward, and we have the exciting chance to get on it.
Sorry for these very long comments but I hope they prove useful. perhaps even to the anonymous writer. Joanna Underwood President, Energy Vision.
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