All the talk about CNG (compressed natural gas) vehicles has made me wonder if anyone around the blogosphere or in the traditional media can do research any more. Even though I’m working on a longish look at CNG as a motor vehicle fuel, a major part of the infamous “Pickens Plan”, I feel compelled to respond to the news today that AT&T is planning to add quite a few CNG vehicles to their corporate fleet.
Gas, Natch: AT and T Goes for Natural-Gas Powered Fleet:
Telecoms titan AT&T has apparently been listening to the endless appeals by T. Boone Pickens to start using natural gas for cars.
AT&T said Wednesday it would spend more than $500 million over the next decade to start moving its vehicle fleet to natural-gas vehicles, hybrids, and other alternatives to regular gasoline-powered cars and trucks, the WSJ reports. That includes $350 million for 8,000 compressed-gas vehicles, and $215 million for 7,000 other “alternative fuel” vehicles.
That’s the biggest corporate commitment to gas-fired vehicles, AT&T says, and will save the company about 50 million gallons of gasoline over the next decade. That savings alone, worth about $100 million at current prices, clearly won’t pay for the plan.
But the move will let AT&T crow about advances on three fronts which are in vogue these days: helping reduce dependence on foreign oil, helping the environment, and even helping American manufacturing. Oh wait, Mr. Pickens is doing the crowing himself, calling AT&T’s plan a “demonstration of real American corporate leadership that will be good for their bottom line, the environment and the country.”
Wait a second–if someone like me is constantly yapping about the need to reduce the oil and carbon intensity of our transportation, isn’t this Really Good News? Well, no.
If you go to the US EPA’s Green Vehicle Guide and look up the greenhouse gas emissions for the Honda Civic[1] you find that the gasoline powered 2009 sedan with an automatic transmission is rated at 6.34 tons/year of greenhouse gases[2]. The 2009 Civic GX, a 100% CNG-fueled version of the nearly ubiquitous sedan, is rated at 5.41 tons/year, a reduction of just under 15%. (The pages I got from my search are here (gasoline) and here (CNG).)
Shifting transportation energy demand away from oil is a good idea, for all the reasons many people, including Pickens and yours truly, have been talking about for a long time. We reduce our dependency on all oil and foreign energy sources, as well as our trade deficit, just to name the obvious pluses. And shifting that energy demand to increasingly domestically produced natural gas, seems like a no-brainer, right?
Sure, unless you think we have to do a hell of a lot better than spend a couple of decades and small mountain of money to convert a significant portion of our passenger vehicles and/or commercial trucks to run on CNG, all for a paltry 15% savings in greenhouse gases. And remember, natural gas is far from a sustainable fuel in the long run; we’d be making a huge, expensive transition, only to set ourselves up for yet another one years down the road.
Why is AT&T doing this, then? I’m guessing it’s a mix of reasons. Perhaps they think they’ll save more money in the long run thanks to lower fuel costs than they’re saying publicly, and maybe they put a high price on greenwashing their public image. And that greenwashing effort is no doubt aided by all the people who trumpet CNG as being a vastly “cleaner and greener” fuel than gasoline and everyone else who fails to do some basic research.
[1] I specified NY models in the search, although I’m guessing that the numbers will be very similar for other states.
[2] These values combine all greenhouse gases converted to an equivalent amount of CO2.
I’m sure your right about it being the money mostly. Natural Gas is always lower than gasoline by a pretty good percentage (per equivalent energy amount). However because it is such an easy replacement for oil products, its price tracks changes in oil prices very closely, (last summer it was twice as expensive as this winter , so we’ll be visiting new natural gas price territory when we hit the oil production limit again – and we haven’t done that in the winter yet).
If AT&T does this its no big deal – alot of big companies have done this before. If Honda decided to sell 200,000 Civic GX’s instead of the 1,500 they sell in the US, then that would be a problem. Since this is what alot of people heat their houses with to keep from freezing – I hope that we do not push this into a major transportation fuel (where its price can be affected by auto use). We need as much slack in this market as we can get in the coming years (International NG prices, which we pay, are going to get very expensive because of future Oil prices).