May
23
Workin’ Through the Weekend
Saturday we left our Birmingham hotel early and headed to the one CNG station in town to fill up, only a $1.369 a gallon of gas equivalent. While we were there we met a small business owner, Libby McConville. Libby and her husband, Mark, own Airport Express, which provides shuttle rides from Birmingham to the Atlanta Airport. They decided to start using CNG for two of their vans just recently. Here is her story:
We then went by a natural gas pipeline compressor station in Tarrant, AL. This facility is operated by El Paso Corporation, which owns the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline system. This was an interesting stop because we learned about the extensive natural gas pipeline network that spans the country moving natural gas from the areas where it is produced to the areas where it is needed.
From the natural gas vehicle perspective, I think this is interesting because while we need more refueling infrastructure, the pipeline infrastructure needed to move it around the country is already present. You can’t say that for other alternative fuels, like ethanol, which for extensive, large scale distribution will need pipelines.
I pulled up some details on the U.S. natural gas pipeline network from the US Energy Information Administration. The US pipeline system includes 305,000 miles of interstate and intrastate transmission pipelines, 1,400 compressor stations, 11,000 delivery points, 5,000 receipt points, 400 underground natural gas storage facilities, 49 locations where natural gas can be imported/exported via pipelines and 8 LNG (liquefied natural gas) import facilities (like the Cameron LNG facility we visited on Thursday.)
We then headed on towards Atlanta, only a couple of hours away – nice change from Friday’s long day of driving. When we arrived we met Ian Driskill with AGL Resources, the local gas supplier in Atlanta. Across the street from their downtown offices, AGL has a parking lot with a CNG refueling device, a FuelMaker “Q” series vehicle refueling appliance (VRA). This is a time-filled device, meaning it fills at a slower rate than a large refueling station, pumping about a gallon an hour into the vehicle. He let me back the Tahoe in to hook it up and refuel overnight. This is a video of Ian explaining how this device works:
Next we headed over to check out Atlanta’s public bus fleet, operated by MARTA. Nearly 2/3 of Atlanta’s buses run on natural gas instead of diesel, making them one of the largest clean fleets in the country. They have a huge facility where they store the buses and refuel them.
