Natural-Gas Suppliers Announce New Stations, Fleet Signings
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Natural-gas suppliers announced the opening of new stations for trucking use at the ACT Expo here.
Shell Oil and Travel Centers of America opened Shell’s first liquefied natural-gas fueling lanes May 5 at TA’s Petro Truck Stop in Ontario, California.
“Based on demand, there’s a lot of focus on natural gas here in California,” Carson Greer, Shell’s general manager for national accounts, told Transport Topics as the Expo floor opened May 6.
Shell displayed a C.R. England Mack LNG-fueled truck at the opening. Greer said the carrier was “starting with a trial and moving on after that.”
Clean Energy Fuels Corp. took a group of ACT Expo attendees its natural-gas fueling station, just outside of the Port of Long Beach, that dispenses LNG and compressed natural gas to about 1,000 trucks a day.
The facility dispenses LNG at a rate of 20 to 22 gallons per minute, and CNG at about 10 gallons per minute, said Chad Lindholm, vice president of Clean Energy’s Western region.
Clean Energy also announced it was designing an LNG station to fuel 40 new LNG trucks of grocery chain Kroger Co. in the Portland, Oregon, area. Kroger said it would be the first fleet to run on LNG in that state.
Love’s Travel Stops said it is planning CNG truck-fueling stations at locations in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Williams, Arizona.
Love’s said the public-access travel stops will be the first along the 960-mile stretch of Interstate 40 between Amarillo, Texas, and Barstow, California, to offer CNG.
The announcement comes after an agreement between Love’s and Kansas-based Seaboard Foods, which has a refrigerated foods transportation division, to expand Love’s fast-fill CNG offerings into new parts of the United States.
“We’ve never had more conversations [about CNG] going on, and expect the second half of the year to get busier,” Bill Cashmareck, Love’s general manager for natural gas, told TT.
Questar Fueling Co. said it opened a CNG station in DeSoto, Texas, and is planning two more in that state and one in the Kansas City area, said Eric Fehr, the company’s director of business development.
The company supplies CNG to Swift Transportation Co. and Central Freight in Texas, Fehr said, adding, “I think you’ll see the infrastructure growing pretty heavy for the next five years.”
Trillium CNG, which also displayed on the Expo floor, has 25 public and eight private fueling stations under construction nationwide, adding to its 36 public and 30 private stations, said Abraham Aljibouri, Southwest director of business development.
For more information, see the May 12 issue of Transport Topics.
