June 4, 2009
Lined up on the street in front of the beautiful Michigan State Capitol on this sunny spring day were: a yellow Schwann’s delivery truck, a new Ford F-150, a Freightliner chassis cab equipped with 3,200-gallon LP tank, a cute 14-seat handicapper bus and a full-size, yellow Bluebird school bus. What they had in common is that they all run on liquid propane (LP) gas – the same gas that heats many of our rural homes – including mine.
The Michigan Propane Gas Association hosts this legislative event on the Capitol lawn every year to get the attention of legislators, who seem always up for a free lunch of burgers, dogs and brats cooked over LP gas grills on the lawn. It seems they may be making progress as the importance of promoting alternative fuels becomes more apparent.
Legislators, and many others, may be a bit gun-shy after going off half cocked on the promotion and subsidization of corn-based ethanol, an ill-conceived plan to supplement motor fuel stocks with ethanol made from food grain by a process that requires more energy input than the fuel provides at the other end.
Propane, as some of you may know, is a plentiful byproduct of the production of gasoline and diesel fuel. About 90% of the propane we use is produced in North America. It is a clean-burning fuel with no particulates and it consistently costs about a buck/gallon less than gasoline regardless of gas price level. And, I’m assured, we have about 150 years worth of it to use.
Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the Federal government is offering a 50 cent/gallon rebate on the fuel, and a substantial rebate on the purchase of the vehicle itself in some cases, making the costs of LP power even more attractive. Some fleet operators – especially larger school districts –are saving huge amounts of money with LP.
The downside is that gasoline and diesel engines must be converted to take advantage of LP. The fuel storage and delivery systems as well as engine management software must be replaced. But that’s not as big a deal as you may expect. It can be done on just about any vehicle and the payback can be huge for fleets. The payback in any application will depend of many factors, of course, like the size and use of the vehicle.
Icom North America of New Hudson, Michigan makes conversion systems for everything from pickup trucks to massive haulers.
Icom chairman, Ralph Perpetuini, says, “the time is right to encourage the use of alternative fuel vehicles through increased tax incentives at the state level” – hence their presence at this State Capitol event. It is Icom’s system, by the way, that is used to covert the Bluebird school bus to LP.
Fleet users will always have their own storage and fueling facilities allowing bulk purchases. Individual users can fuel their vehicles at the same places that supply RV tanks and home LP services. That is to say, the infrastructure is already in place, giving LP a leg up on many of the other alternative fuel systems we’ve been talking about for the future.
LP may also be the safest of the alternative fuels. If spilled it just seeps into the ground and dissipates without ill effect. It is non-polluting, less volatile than other fuels and the storage tanks, though bulky, will withstand unimaginable abuse without rupturing. One of the LP promoters at the event quipped, “When was the last time you heard of an LP explosion? It just doesn’t happen. The defense rests.”
So, what’s the downside? For one thing, those big, heavy, bulky tanks that hold enough for about half the cruising range we’re used to. That’s not as big a deal for cargo truck and bus applications, of course. We’re also not accustomed to thinking of LP as transportation fuel.
Perhaps it is time we rethink that.