Vancouver gas prices

The high costs of compressed natural gas (CNG) compared to clean-diesel are causing major headaches in North America from coast to coast, as Washington, D.C. Metro Transit Authority (WMATA) and Vancouver, British Columbia face new funding crises.

CNG refueling facility retrofit costs have nearly doubled for WMATA, from an original $8 million estimate, to over $15.4 million today, on top of $40,000 per-bus cost premium for CNG versus clean-diesel buses.

An earlier study showed that WMATA could have converted its entire fleet (and supplemented service) with clean-diesel for a fraction of the millions spent on CNG, with far more total emissions reductions, especially on a per-dollar basis (see Diesel Fuel News 9/25/2000, p4). Problem: WMATA board members were cowed into CNG by a shrill "diesel kills" propaganda campaign pushed by the gas lobby's "green" allies, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club.

As a result of soaring costs for a project already costing over $43 million, some WMATA board members questioned whether it makes sense to continue going forward with costly CNG, especially as WMATA has just switched its entire fleet to ultra-low-sulfur diesel (ULSD) and plans to install particulate matter (PM) filters on nearly 1,000 diesel buses (see Diesel Fuel News 10/29/2001, p5).

New diesel buses produced starting next October will have only slightly higher nitrogen oxides (NOx) than CNG buses, and will match or beat CNG on PM, HC, CO and "toxics," thanks to the combination of PM filters and ULSD. All this at a fraction of the cost of CNG.

On the other hand, WMATA's switch to ULSD will deliver nearly 17 tons of PM reduction at only $85,000/ton cost, versus $1.65 million per ton with the costly CNG buses, Diesel Technology Forum spokesman Allen Schaeffer points out. "This makes CNG almost twenty times more expensive to achieve the same clean-air goals," he claimed.

To compensate for soaring CNG costs, WMATA's board voted last week to defer maintenance on overflowing customer parking garages at Metro rail stops.

Elsewhere, new budget deficits at Translink, parent company of Vancouver's local transit agency (Coast Mountain), are forcing the agency to park high-cost CNG buses, and likewise think about a switch to lower-cost options.

The Vancouver transit agency has among the best apples-to-apples cost data in North America on CNG versus diesel buses, having run identical buses of the same model year (since 1995), rather than the skewed data often used by CNG proponents comparing new CNG buses to 20-year-old diesel buses.

Taxpayer revolts over car tax schemes to subsidize local transit have forced Vancouver to park CNG buses, because these buses have a proven 35% higher average operating cost than identical diesel buses of the same model years, Coast Mountain confirms. Potentially, Coast Mountain might consider selling the CNG uses and replacing them with lower-cost clean-diesels if the budget crisis isn't resolved next year.