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I don’t actually know if Rep. Ben Ray Lujan is for using natural gas as a vehicle fuel or not (“Lujan Pushes Natural Gas,” Aug. 22 Journal), but the subject has been tossed around for 50 years.
I joined Southern Union Gas in 1973 as their vehicle maintenance supervisor. They discontinued a natural gas refueling experimental project only the year before. In 1986 it was resurrected and ran fairly successfully for the next 14 years.
At the time I retired in 2000 as alternative fuels customer service manager, the city of Albuquerque was using natural gas to fuel its transit buses and we were servicing city, state and federal vehicles using natural gas. Gas Company of New Mexico and later PNM Gas Services invested several million dollars to support natural gas vehicle refueling facilities from Aztec in the north to Alamogordo in the south. There were refueling sites at Los Alamos and Sandia Labs.
The program fell apart in most of the state due to lack of participation.
One of my last acts before I retired was to disassemble and sell a station in Roswell because the city of Roswell failed to support the station. We shipped it to Utah. It was set up originally to fuel several city transit buses and a fleet of converted city vehicles.
What happened? It’s hard to break old habits using gasoline in a vehicle that has to be fueled only once a week or so, rather than natural gas, which has to be done daily.
We, the gas company, tried to make it painless by installing slow-fill stations where the vehicles could park and fill overnight. In the morning, the driver would quick disconnect and then start and drive off for the day’s duties full of fuel for the day.
Even that didn’t work. It takes some discipline, which most workers and some supervisors didn’t have, so over time the program failed.
It’s nice that Lujan talks about using natural gas as a fuel, but talk is cheap and rarely results in action. The benefits of using natural gas as fuel are numerous, from cleaner air, longer oil changes resulting in saving oil and cheaper fuel – not to mention less required oil imports.
Maybe we were ahead of our time, but I don’t think so. It takes dedication – better yet, dedicated vehicles that run only on natural gas fuel.
I still believe that large fleets are the best candidates due to economies of scale. I also believe hydrogen is the fuel of the future for transportation and that using a gaseous fuel like natural gas is good training for the future use of hydrogen.
