Limited Availability of LNG Spurs Firm to Boost Supply
This story appears in the March 19 print edition of Transport Topics.
The use of liquefied natural gas as a U.S. truck fuel has a diverse array of proponents, including President Obama, ATA Chairman Dan England, corporations such as UPS Inc. and Ryder System and environmental activists. But as of now, the super-cold fuel is hard to find.
While one energy company has made it a mission to increase LNG availability, a Feb. 25 survey by the Department of Energy found just 46 fueling stations in the United States that sold liquefied natural gas, with another five due to be on-line by the end of July. California has 35 of those current stations, while Texas has five and six other states have one each.
Clean Energy Fuels, Seal Beach, Calif., has started an investment campaign to radically increase availability this year and next. The company said it will spend $450 million to open 70 U.S. public stations this year and another 80 in 2013.
“We’re calling this America’s Natural Gas Highway, and they will all be public-access, retail outlets at truck stops. Any private stations that we build for customers will be in addition to these 150 stations, not a part of them,” said Greg Roche, Clean Energy vice president of infrastructure and national accounts.
Stations can dispense LNG, compressed natural gas or both, using a single gas reservoir with separate pumps. LNG emerges to enter a truck at minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit, but under pressure of less than 100 pounds per square inch, Roche said. In contrast, CNG gets pumped at ambient temperature into a truck or bus, but under high pressure: 3,600 psi (see a related story in Equipment & Maintenance Update, March-April 2012, p. 1).
The engineering specifications of the two fuels are well documented, but pricing data are harder to find. Neither DOE nor Bloomberg News track LNG prices for U.S. truck fuel.
“There really aren’t enough locations around the country for an index to make sense now,” Roche said. Clean Energy currently charges about $2.80 per diesel-gallon equivalent now, he said.
The February DOE survey explicitly mentions Clean Energy in connection with 21 of the 51 stations in current operation or coming soon. Roche said Clean Energy does not have a monopoly on LNG transportation fuel, but it is the dominant company in the segment.
CNG data are more plentiful. DOE publishes its Clean Cities Alternative Fuel Price Report on a quarterly basis. In January, the national average price for CNG was $2.13 per gasoline-gallon equivalent, or GGE, up from $2.09 in October. The survey looks at prices in 358 locations nationwide.
The January price for CNG was at its highest level since mid-2008, when it was about $2.40 per GGE, but diesel fuel set a record of $4.764 a gallon on July 14 of that year.
DOE’s Clean Cities report also tracks public-station prices versus private-station prices. In January, when the national average was $2.13 per GGE, the private average was just $1.85 — the price paid by the operator of the in-house station. The public average in January was $2.26 — the price paid by a retail customer.
DOE found 976 CNG stations in operation in February, far more than for LNG, but still trailing significantly behind the 5,900 U.S. stations offering diesel fuel for trucks listed in The Trucker’s Friend, a truck-stop directory. Robert de Vos, who compiles Trucker’s Friend, said he will have a LNG/CNG listing in his 2013 edition.
The idea behind a “gallon equivalent” — diesel for LNG and gasoline for CNG — enables purchasers to make comparisons based on well-understood amounts of energy, as measured in British thermal units.
DOE says a gallon of ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel has an energy content of 128,450 Btus, and so does a diesel-gallon equivalent of LNG. Diesel is tremendously dense in terms of energy per volume, so a trucker needs to burn about 1.72 gallons of LNG to get the same energy as in a gallon of diesel.
Diesel also has about 111% of the energy of a gallon of gasoline.
For CNG the comparison is with gasoline, which holds 116,090 Btus per gallon, according to DOE. Because CNG is a gas rather than a liquid, it is difficult to measure by the gallon. However, DOE says 5.66 pounds of CNG, or 126.7 cubic feet, makes up one GGE.
“For heavy-duty fleets, I think LNG as a fuel option should be carefully considered.” said Frank Raso, an entrepreneur and mechanical engineer in Stevensville, Ontario. “Depending upon the fleet’s circumstances, it may or may not make economic sense,” he said. The website for his company, Raso Enterprises, offers a lot of technical information on alternative transportation fuels, including LNG and CNG.
