LAFAYETTE, La. — Two public fueling stations for natural gas-powered vehicles are set to open next year as part of initiatives that include new buses and converting at least 40 city-parish vehicles to run on the fuel.
The efforts come in a wider push by government and industry to develop natural gas as an alternative vehicle fuel that is touted as a cleaner burning and cheaper than gasoline.
The city-parish is planning to open one fueling station at the public works facility on East University Avenue by next fall. The Advocate reports a second station is under construction by Apache Corporation, a Houston-based oil and gas company that has been at the forefront of promoting natural gas as a vehicle fuel.
That fueling station is expected to open by February, said Frank Chapel, who oversees Apache’s natural gas initiative.
He said the company has already built seven such stations in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico and is planning nine more, including the one in Lafayette.
Both stations will be open to the general public, but the main market is expected to be the large vehicle fleets maintained by government agencies and private industry, particularly the oil-and-gas service companies in and around Lafayette.
Lafayette has the largest concentration of fleet vehicles in the state, Chapel said. Natural gas could offer those companies an alternative that is on average about 30 percent cheaper than diesel or gasoline, he said.
Lafayette city-parish government has already seen the savings since rolling out five natural gas-powered buses earlier this year, Tramel said.
The new buses had been traveling to Baton Rouge for natural gas before a temporary fueling station was installed in December in Lafayette, he said, but the fuel costs have still been cheaper than the older diesel-powered buses.
“Even driving over there and back, we were still saving money,” Tramel said.
He said city-parish government plans to replace the entire municipal fleet with natural gas-fueled buses when the older diesel ones are retired in the coming years.
If the entire fleet of about 20 buses all ran on natural gas, the annual fuel cost for the service would likely drop from $800,000 a year to less than $600,000 a year, Tramel said.
Fuel savings could be seen in other departments after city-parish government completes a project to convert 40 government vehicles to run off natural gas.
The conversions are expected to be done by April, Tramel said.
The caveat, he said, is that the economics would not work if city-parish government had to pay the up-front costs of converting vehicles, building a new fueling station and retrofitting maintenance facilities to work with natural gas vehicles.
“The only way this works is if we get grant money to make this happen,” Tramel said.
City-parish government has received more than $2.5 million in federal grants and state appropriations for natural gas initiatives, most of which has gone toward the $1.7 million fueling station.
City-parish government has been approved for an additional $750,000 in federal funds for the conversion of another 65 government vehicles to run on natural gas.
Tramel said the money is available because other cities in the state that had initially applied for federal dollars to pay for natural gas initiatives have not moved quickly enough to meet the deadline for spending the money. He said it is still uncertain whether Lafayette will be able to take advantage of the windfall, because the additional conversions would probably need to be done by April.
That’s a tight deadline considering that the project must be put out to public bid and that it is difficult to find a company to handle a large volume of natural gas conversions on such short notice, he said.
The two fueling stations taking shape in Lafayette will expand the network of already existing ones in the state and could spur more interest in using the alternative fuel, said Louisiana Oil and Gas Association Vice President Gifford Briggs.
He said that the only publicly accessible stations at this time are in Baton Rouge and in the Shreveport.
So when is Houston going to start this program?