Monday, March 21, 2011 11:19 PM
By Josh Jarman

The Columbus Dispatch
Backers of alternative fuels see a silver lining in rising pump prices.

With gas and diesel prices climbing past $3 and $4 a gallon, respectively, cities, companies and environmentalists are once again talking about compressed natural gas, or CNG, as a smart alternative. Although powering vehicles with natural gas has advantages - an average price of $1.70 per gasoline gallon equivalent and 60 percent lower carbon emissions - making the switch to CNG is expensive because there is no fueling infrastructure comparable to gas stations.

The city of Columbus is among those helping to change that. The city is building a CNG fueling station at its fuel center on Groves Road and hopes to open it to the public by October. It's part of a plan to add 24 CNG vehicles to the city's fleet this year, with a promise for more vehicles and three more stations over the next seven years.

The new vehicles are only a fraction of the more than 3,000 in the city's fleet, but they are replacing the worst fuel hogs: trash trucks, dump trucks and street sweepers. Kelly Reagan, the city's fleet administrator, said the city's trash trucks, for example, average about 2 miles per gallon and burn more than 4,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year.

City officials estimate that using 24 CNG vehicles can reduce harmful carbon emissions that contribute to air pollution. The city also will save money on fuel, about $60,000 to $90,000 a year. But price is not the prime reason for switching, Reagan said.

"First and foremost, this plan didn't begin with fuel prices; it began because it's the right thing to do," he said. "But, oh, by the way, we're going to save a ton on fuel."

Reagan said switching to natural-gas vehicles doesn't always add up to savings because of the higher initial cost and, in the city's case, the need to build a fuel center.

Grants and tax incentives can help, though, and once the city makes the fuel center available to the public, its use by private companies will help subsidize the city's costs. The $978,000 the City Council approved in January to build the station comes from a federal grant, with about $400,000 more in grant money going to help buy vehicles.

The cost of CNG vehicles and limited refueling locations are among the key reasons most early users have large, centralized fleets that travel along fixed routes, said Doyle Sumrall, senior director of business development for the National Truck Equipment Association, which held its fifth annual Green Truck Summit two weeks ago in Indianapolis. Of the alternative fuels discussed at the summit, he said, the largest buzz this year was about CNG.

"While petroleum-based fuels are not getting any cheaper, CNG is an expanding resource," Sumrall said.

He said some of the summit's speakers called North America "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas," with large natural deposits and new techniques, such as deep-shale drilling, to make the fuel more readily available.

Andrew Conley, program manager for Clean Fuels Ohio, a Columbus-based nonprofit organization that helped the city apply for the federal grant, said his group is working to bring 129 vehicles and seven fueling stations to Ohio this year. Another benefit to natural gas, he said, is that, although most of it comes from underground, it also can be made through a process that turns organic waste into methane, essentially turning garbage into gas.

Mel Kurtz, president of the Quasar Energy Group of Cleveland, said his company has four "digester" plants in Ohio, including one in Columbus, and plans to break ground on eight more this year that will convert organic waste and sewage sludge to natural gas. All eventually will have public fueling stations attached to them.

For now, the plants will use the gas to power electric generators because there isn't enough of a market for vehicle fuel. Kurtz faults the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and what he says is an unnecessarily complicated process to get new CNG-powered engines approved in America.

Until more cars are made with natural-gas engines, the cost will be prohibitive for the average commuter, he said.

For example, the most widely available consumer car built to run on CNG is a Honda Civic model that costs about $7,000 more than a similarly equipped gasoline-powered Civic. If both cars were driven 15,000 miles a year on the highway, it would take more than seven years to recoup the difference with gas prices at $4 a gallon.

The environmental and energy-dependence benefits to natural gas should push companies to make the switch, however, and prices will come down with greater use, Kurtz said.

Buck