MD Counties switching to cleaner fuel

The Baltimore Sun reports that Howard and Anne Arundel Counties "plan to establish the state's first natural-gas fueling station for trash trucks and have applied to the Environmental Protection Agency for $600,000 in grant money to help haulers switch to alternative-fuel vehicles." This type of program has already been tested: "Natural-gas trash trucks have been in service in California since 1997."

There is also a positive impact to the bottom line. According to the "regional account manager for Clean Energy Fuels Corp., the company proposing to build the shared fueling station in Jessup, 'The haulers are paying less for fuel, the county is getting hit with less surcharge, and the people are getting cleaner air and pay less in taxes," he said. "It's cleaner, it's domestic and it reduces our dependency on foreign oil'." Right now, according to the article, the cost of oil is twice the cost of natural gas.

Guess who founded Clean Energy Fuels Corp? T. Boone Pickens. When he says "I'm an oil man," add natural gas to that list. Oh, and wind. He wants to build the world's largest wind farm. Smart people know where the money is. Hello, investors?

My instinct is that these natural gas vehicles will be obsolete in ten years once we have updated the electricity grid and switched to plug-in electric vehicles (with a grid powered largely by wind and solar- more on some AMAZING recent breakthroughs in solar soon...). EPA is also not convinced that the natural gas-operated trash trucks are that great for the environment, claiming that newer diesel engines are just as clean.

One interesting thing I learned in the article is that some counties require their haulers to buy new trucks when signing contracts with the municipalities. I imagine this helps a lot with the municipality's greenhouse gas emissions inventory!