CNG has a foothold in certain areas, but adopters caution that the fuel can be expensive to implement into a fleet and the bus fuel tanks need to be replaced after 15 years.
and currently propane seems to be the leader in the category,” said Mike Bullman, maintenance director for the South Carolina DOE. “Our plan currently is to closely evaluate the alternative buses that we have in operation and make a decision based on the evaluation that will best serve the students.” Bullman added that the DOE will make the final decision on adding addition alternative-fuel buses based on a number of key factors such as overall performance, fuel economy, cost of opera- tion, initial cost, and long term reliability.
THE CNG ALTERNATIVE Herb Jensen, director of transportation for the Jordan School
District in West Jordan, Utah, has been using CNG for 20 years, since before he led the department and the fuel gained in popu- larity outside of California. He said his 75 CNG buses have paid unexpected dividends for an overall fleet of 247. With one million total miles traveled each year, Jensen said the low cost of CNG is equating to an overall fleet savings of 25 cents per mile. “We could see the technology had great promise and we could affect the environment in a positive way,” Jensen said. “What we didn’t pay much attention to was how much money it would save us. We started out to be environmentally responsible, not we have our own CNG compressor and we’re spending between 50 cents and a dollar per gallon.” Jensen agreed that CNG can be expensive at the outset because of the cost of the infrastructure, the limited availability of fueling stations and the incremental purchase price. He said CNG buses cost about $28,000 more than a diesel bus. “Tere are plenty of grants to deal with that,” he said. “Over the past five or six years, we’ve received more than $1 million in federal and state grants.” Grants are what enabled officials in the Blue Springs, Missouri, School District to pay for CNG infrastructure when the high cost of diesel forced the district to look at alternatives for replacing its aging fleet. Assistant Superintendent Bill Cowling said the transi- tion was an extremely detailed process that started four years ago.
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