The W.W. Transport and Easton PA CNG Vehicle Conversion Project

Impact Overview

Number of Vehicles Converted:
 
30

Petroleum Displacement:
 
449,000 gal per year

Project Partners

W.W. Transport, Inc.

Project Description

This project seeks to expand the usage of natural gas as a domestically produced reliable vehicle fuel. This project will help spur the usage of CNG to an undersubscribed area, in both the availability of regional infrastructure and vehicle conversions. Our project will help purchase and convert 30 Class 8 diesel tractors to CNG. The development of this project will be instrumental in helping Northampton county and more specifically Easton PA with its foray into using CNG as a vehicle fuel.

W.W Transport headquartered in West Burlington Iowa has been working in the Easton Pennsylvania for over 10 years. Our Pennsylvania operations have our vehicles delivering processed agriculture products all over the state and region. This program gives us the opportunity to convert 30 of our 45 vehicles domiciled in Pennsylvania to Compressed Natural Gas as a vehicle fuel. The vehicles that we will replace are twenty-five 2012 International Prostar Series, with twenty-five 2015 Peterbilt Model 384 CNG. We will also replace five 2013 International Prostar Series with five 2015 Freightliner Columbia Dual Fuel models, which will total 30 vehicles running on CNG at the completion of this project. 

Currently, there is no infrastructure that can help supply our fleet with the needed volume of fuel. We have partnered with Great River Energy, who is in the process of engineering and permitting a public access CNG station to be constructed at 5137 Lower Mud Run Road, Easton PA 18040, by October 2015. This station will have 30 time fill stations specifically designed for our fleet of vehicles and 2 dual hosed fast fill dispensers for public access and use by our anchor fleet. 

The public accessibility will be open 24/7/365 and have a fuel management system that will take all credit cards and fleet cards. The station will have a canopy with 2 dispensers and each dispenser will have a fast fill nozzle and a super flow rate fill connection rated at 5000 SCFM. The station is designed for Class 8 tractors with trailers and will have easy directional traffic flow over the 2.5 acre property for ease of access and exit. 

We project to utilize approximately 449,000 GGE’s per year of natural gas with our own fleet’s metric. This was determined by taking the yearly mileage of our vehicles of 76,000 each, dividing by the diesel fuel we utilize each year (13,945) and coming up with a miles per gallon number of 5.45 per vehicle. We then took those numbers and used the Department of Energy’s Petroleum Reduction calculator and ran the numbers, (see attached Appendix A). We used 2 separate calculations; the first one we used was for 25 vehicles that will be running dedicated CNG vehicles and got 392,000 GGE’s per year. The second calculation was using 5 vehicles; we realize that while using a dual fuel vehicles, they still utilize a 30% diesel in combination with 70% CNG usage. So we included fuel usage to the calculator of 70% for those 5 vehicles of 57,453 GGE’s/ year and added together with the other 25 vehicles GGE/year we get the total of ~449,453 GGE/Year for the total projected usage. 

The cost of up fitting our vehicles is substantial; the incremental cost for each of the 25 Peterbilt’s CNG Model 384 is $61,700 each. And the incremental cost to convert the 5 Freightliners Colombia vehicles to dual fuel is $33,500 each; totaling $1,710,000.00. In order to make the most impact and show financial payback we have decided to take only 29% of state money and fund the other 71% of the incremental cost. We are requesting $500,000 of grant money but will be spending $1,210,000 in match to fund this project. The project will demonstrate the financial viability within 3 years as noted in the calculations attached (appendix B & C); we will save approximately $488,539 per year in fuel savings with all 30 vehicles being online. When we take that savings out for the minimum 4 years we will have recouped $1,954,156 in fuel savings. When we take this out to the minimal requirement of maintaining operations within Pennsylvania of 6 years the financial advantage of using CNG over diesel comes out to $2,931,234. These assumptions are noted in current conditions with the information based on our fleet’s historical data. Note the payback will be faster if the cost of diesel rises or the price of natural gas drops, or both happen. 

The funding of this project will be critical for the adoption of using CNG as a vehicle fuel in our region of Pennsylvania. Our company has had operations in Pennsylvania since 2003 and plans to expand our operations in the next few years. We intend to maintain operations in PA for more than six years as required, we will register all of our vehicles in Pennsylvania, utilizing federal funds where and when available and comply with all federal, state and local safety requirements including EPA rules and regulations. 

The W.W. Transport and Easton PA CNG Vehicle Conversion Project Initiative seeks to help a regional fleet with their conversion to CNG. Our project will help inaugurate our venture into utilizing Pennsylvania’s abundance of natural gas supply as a vehicle fuel. This project will help construct a much needed public infrastructure in the Northampton county near heavily traveled trucking corridors. This is certain to attract other fleets and encourage adoption of CNG within this region. EP-ACT is poised to help implement this initiative and will provide education and outreach to other fleets in this area as to the availability and benefits of CNG. Together, with the inclusion of the station, the project is close to $4 million in public/private contributions. It is this type of commitment that is necessary to bring acceptance of CNG as an economically viable, plentiful, and beneficial option over imported petroleum fuel.


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