Tag Archives: vehicles

Utah already has 29 fueling stations and an estimated 5,000-8,000 CNG-powered cars on the highway making it one of the leaders in the country. Well, the Utah Clean Cities Coalition and Questar Gas just added one more fueling station to the mix by working together to open a new station near Vernal, Utah.

The fueling station cost approximately $500,000. Clean Cities covered about a quarter of the cost from a $15 million federal stimulus grant. Next up for Clean Cities and Questar is making Utah’s I-80 corridor more NGV-friendly by extending it into Nevada and Wyoming.

Thanks to Paula and Jim Grambihler at Questar for pointing me to the story. You can get the full read over at the Salt Lake Tribune.

Alagasco has expanded their natural gas fleet to 29 vehicles, up from seven in December 2009, and is planning on further expansion to 400 compressed natural gas vehicles (CNG) vehicles within five years. That’s quite an investment and just goes to show the popularity that natural gas vehicles are experiencing.

A key takeaway from the article is that while Alagasco is expanding its natural gas fleet, they are also planning to build nine fueling stations across its service territory in Alabama over the next 2½ years. The refueling infrastructure has always been one of the key issues with natural gas vehicles, so this is good news. Two of the refueling stations are scheduled for completion by year’s end. The costs involved in the building of a station range from $400,000 for smaller stations to more than $1 million for those able to handle larger fleets.

Bob Strickland, Alagasco’s manager of clean transportation, said Alagasco is teaming with municipalities and private parties interested in adding to their fleets of CNG vehicles or in building natural gas fueling stations. Bob also chairs the Southeastern States NGV Corridor Committee, a coalition working to build a network of CNG fueling stations across the Southeast.

Bob also has a great quote in the story: “There are more than 10 million natural gas vehicles worldwide, but only about 120,000 in the U.S. What is interesting is that many of the foreign countries that sell us oil are running their vehicles on natural gas because they want to sell their oil to us instead of using it themselves.”

That is interesting, indeed.

Thanks to Paula for sending over this great story from the Birmingham News. There’s more there and it’s worth a read.

One of the sites I follow every day is CNGNow. They do a great job keeping up with all the news about compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles. The latest example is the story they featured from Tulsa World about Owasso accepting a $1.45 million federal stimulus grant to develop a CNG filling station. Some highlights from the article:

• Money will be distributed by the state to develop a CNG fueling facility and convert as many as 50 gasoline-powered city vehicles to CNG by March 2012.
• Cost of the fueling infrastructure will be $500,000, with the total cost of the conversion kits being $900,000. The design and engineering of the project is estimated at $50,000.
• Grant also includes $300,000 in matching funds for the purchase of property, with the matching amount to be generated from private donations.
• Conversion will cut Owasso’s fuel costs by 20 percent to 25 percent.

A picture of the portable fueling tank the Route 66 guys made.

CNGNow estimates that the United States operates about 1,100 of the 12,000 CNG stations in the world to power. These stations power only 150,000 of the estimated 10 million CNG vehicles worldwide. That’s only about 1.5 percent. Infrastructure is going to be paramount in developing CNG vehicles into a viable alternative to replace today’s automobiles. We can’t all construct our own portable filling stations like the guys from Route66. Let me know what you think of a CNG vehicle world in the comments below.