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Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Salem CNG buses in action
Can someone (Jason?) tell me why TriMet does not utilize compressed natural gas equipment? With diesel fuel at over 3 dollars/gallon and the natural gas equivalent at 1.75,it would make sense to convert. Am I missing something?
Actually Cherriots is starting to phase out the CNG buses - their newest (100 and 200 series) buses are "clean diesel" (ultra-low sulfur diesel) buses.
TriMet used to have LNG buses, when PGE had a LNG vehicle fleet. When PGE phased out the use of LNG TriMet didn't have a place to refuel the buses - and thus the LNG buses went away.
Right now Pierce Transit and LACMTA are the largest CNG users in the area that I'm aware of. I know there are certain drawbacks with CNG (in particular fueling facilities), and now with ULSD the emissions differences aren't that great between CNG and ULSD. I also believe that while the cost per gallon is lower, CNG gets you fewer miles per gallon so you end up burning more CNG - but I could be wrong there.
As I've noted before, from what I've seen Cherriots a) didn't want to stick with one fuel and b) found maintenance costs to outweigh the savings. I don't know what other agencies' experience has been.
Can someone (Jason?) tell me why TriMet does not utilize compressed natural gas equipment? With diesel fuel at over 3 dollars/gallon and the natural gas equivalent at 1.75,it would make sense to convert. Am I missing something?
2 comments:
Actually Cherriots is starting to phase out the CNG buses - their newest (100 and 200 series) buses are "clean diesel" (ultra-low sulfur diesel) buses.
TriMet used to have LNG buses, when PGE had a LNG vehicle fleet. When PGE phased out the use of LNG TriMet didn't have a place to refuel the buses - and thus the LNG buses went away.
Right now Pierce Transit and LACMTA are the largest CNG users in the area that I'm aware of. I know there are certain drawbacks with CNG (in particular fueling facilities), and now with ULSD the emissions differences aren't that great between CNG and ULSD. I also believe that while the cost per gallon is lower, CNG gets you fewer miles per gallon so you end up burning more CNG - but I could be wrong there.
As I've noted before, from what I've seen Cherriots a) didn't want to stick with one fuel and b) found maintenance costs to outweigh the savings. I don't know what other agencies' experience has been.
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