Saddle Creek unveils new trucks, fueling station
newschief.com
LAKELAND -- As part of its commitment to a cleaner environment, Saddle Creek Corp. unveiled its fleet of 40 Freightliner trucks fully powered by compressed natural gas and a fueling station at its Lakeland facility Wednesday.
"It's going to take over 4 million pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere every year," Saddle Creek President Michael DelBovo said. "That's huge."
The company invested about $22 million in the trucks and the fueling facility and expects to add another 80 such trucks in coming months. The natural gas costs $2.25 per gallon, compared with the current average cost of diesel of $4.05 per gallon.
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Rolling with natural gas
Sean Kilcarr March 1st, 2012
blog.fleetowner.com
Got a chance to test drive some natural gas-fired trucks this week at a customer event hosted by Peterbilt Motors Co. at the Texas Motor Speedway (and NO, we weren’t racing them; we were neither on the main track nor up high in the corners, thank you very much).
[snip] video clips at link
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How Natural Gas Will Transform the Automobile
February 29, 2012
worldpolicy.org
By Michael S. Lerner
Gasoline’s reign of dominance in worldwide transportation is being eroded by a new contender. The challenge is not imminent, but it can no longer be dismissed or ignored. Take a walk through the streets of New Delhi, and everything from passenger cars and commercial trucks to the city buses and the three-wheel motorized rickshaws runs on natural gas. The Indian city has the world’s largest municipal fleet of natural gas vehicles (NGVs), at 450,000. Working with Sweden, the global pioneer of NGVs using renewable natural gas, New Delhi will soon be using biogas generated from its own sewage treatment plants to fuel some of its NGVs. Remarkable, yes, but it is far from an isolated case. Countries all over the world are enacting similar programs. Gasoline-fueled vehicles will still predominate for quite some time, but the future of automobiles is already here.
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Why Obama Is Wrong About Natural Gas
rollingstone.com
...As Nelder points out, when you look at actual proven reserves, we have only about 11 years worth of gas. If that's true, it raises a whole lot of interesting questions about future energy investments. I mean, if T. Boone Pickens wants to invest hundreds of millions of his dollars to convert vehicles to natural gas, that’s up to him – but why invest big public dollars in a fuel that might not last much more than a decade?
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Where have I seen this old lame argument before? Take Proven Reserves, which are estimates
of what's recoverable from well established or known reservoirs with the existing equipment and under the existing operating and market conditions, divide by current consumption and cry, "OMG! we're going to run out in ten years!" |
