Truckers can save by giving it the (natural) gas

Trimac Transportation driver Robert Williams uses the natural gas lane at the Flying J truck stop on I-10 in Baytown. Trimac Transportation driver Robert Williams uses the natural gas lane at the Flying J truck stop on I-10 in Baytown. Photo: Dave Rossman Photo: Dave Rossman Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Truckers can save by giving it the (natural) gas 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Let's face it, all that cheap American natural gas hasn't done much for your car lately. For 18-wheelers, however, it's a different story.

American truckers have shown enough interest in the low-cost fuel to influence a rush of new vehicle manufacturing and bring about a wave of momentum behind the resource.

Manufacturers are planning to release four new natural-gas-powered truck engines and several new truck models over the next three years. By contrast, no automaker is saying it will add to the single factory-built consumer model on American roads: the Honda Civic Natural Gas.

And while infrastructure development has been slow for consumer-oriented natural gas stations, Clean Energy Fuels Corp. plans to cover major trucking routes with a network of 150 stations by the end of 2013. Shell and Travel Centers of America announced this year they plan to offer natural gas pumps at 100 truck stops nationwide.

Diesel defectors

With prices around $4 a gallon for diesel-guzzling trucking fleets, carriers have turned their attention to natural gas, which this year hit its lowest prices in a decade amid a production boom from shale.

"It's the perfect storm for a wave of diesel defectors to come to natural gas," said Matt Feighner, regional vice president of Clean Energy's national trucking team.

That alignment hasn't reached the noncommercial market, with carmakers and builders of refueling stations seemingly waiting on each other.

That has not been a factor in the truck market.

"The interest is incredibly high," said Greg Treinen, a product marketing manager of alternative fuels for Freightliner Trucks, a division of Daimler Trucks North America.

Switching to natural gas can save companies tens of thousands of dollars in annual fuel costs for trucks of about the same size, power and payload, according to Daimler.

Although natural-gas-powered trucks cost around $40,000 more, companies could make up that difference in less than two years because of fuel cost savings.

With that kind of savings available for big fuel users, it hasn't been hard for Freightliner to turn doubters into believers.

"There's quite a bit of pent-up demand," said Treinen.

Cummins Westport, which makes the engines used in the Freightliner trucks, has produced over 13,000 of its 8.9-liter natural gas engines since 2007 and plans to release a 12-liter model in 2013 because of strong demand for more power.

Freightliner has sold more than 1,500 natural-gas-powered trucks over the last four years, around 1 percent of its overall sales, Treinen said.

That number is expected to grow dramatically as more trucks and stations become available, Treinen said.

Expansion planned

And stations, Clean Energy says, are on the way.

The company is spending $225 million to complete 70 stations by the end of this year and another 80 next year, all of them spaced on long-haul truck routes to create a truly viable natural gas support network, Clean Energy's Feighner said.

Its "America's Natural Gas Highway" plan to develop the stations came as Clean Energy executives realized there was serious appetite among the country's biggest fuel users for natural gas and the savings it could provide them, he said.

But the real game-changer for natural gas trucking has come in Clean Energy's approach to delivering the gas in a specific form: As liquefied natural gas, or LNG, as opposed to compressed natural gas, or CNG, Feigner said.

LNG trucks are about the same weight as diesel trucks, while CNG tanks can be much heavier and take up more space in order to offer the same travel range,cutting into the space on the truck for paying freight.

LNG pumps can fill tanks about as fast as diesel pumps can, whereas CNG, which is used in cars and regional fleets, take much longer.

And LNG truck-fueling stations are less than half as expensive to build as CNG stations, according to Clean Energy. A four-pump LNG station costs $2 million, while a CNG station of the same size would cost $5 million.

The Clean Energy and Shell truck stations will offer LNG pumps. Shell plans to open its first LNG fuel lanes next year.

CNG still remains the better option for consumer vehicles and regional fleets that return to the same locations nightly, since they don't need the long travel ranges provided by the higher-density and more expensive LNG and because they can be fueled slowly overnight.

Use of Clean Energy's LNG stations is not high, however, as the station network and the trucks still are being developed.

On a recent morning at the company's Baytown refueling station, on the property of a Flying J station, no trucks refueled during a nearly three-hour period.

And Clean Energy hasn't supplied fuel to another area LNG truck station that it recently completed because it doesn't see enough demand yet for the product.

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