Trucking And The Pickens Plan

Comment

Comment by Frank on August 3, 2011 at 10:54am

The cost of converting a truck to LNG or of buying an LNG truck requires that LNG is priced near the pipeline price of natural gas to have reasonable payback without subsidies.  T Boone Pickens frequently compares the cost of pipeline natural gas (currently around $4/MCF) with the cost of an energy equivalent amount of diesel  (~$30, IIRC).  $4/MCF natural gas converted to a Diesel Gallon Equivalent (DGE) comes out to about $0.527/DGE.  Price reports of existing Greater Los Angeles Area (GLAA) public LNG stations show that LNG is priced at around $2.20 to $2.58/gallon, which translates to about $3.81/DGE to $4.47/DGE.  With diesel currently selling for about $4/gallon in the GLAA, cost savings are minimal at best for using LNG.  If you repower a diesel truck with spark-ignition LNG engine, using LNG will even cost more because spark-ignition engines have lower fuel efficiency than diesels.  LNG is only prevalent in in California because regulations mandate its use.

Without a regulatory requirement, the economics of a converting a fleet to LNG point to the on-site LNG refueling of fleets that return to a central terminal daily.  Ideally, each truck will drive far enough to consume nearly an entire tank of fuel each day.  The cost of the LNG fuel system (the majority of which is the fuel tank) requires that the vehicle to consume as much LNG as possible to maximize the savings.  A large fleet would be much better off building its own on-site LNG refueling system with natural gas obtained directly from the producer rather than buying LNG from a public station.

For vehicles that are in continuous operation, fuel losses from venting should be minimal.  For vehicles with single-line fill procedures, there is an economizer valve in the tank system that blends LNG tank vapor into the liquid fuel supply to the engine.  Boil-off in these tanks is because of heat gain and there is no refrigeration effect as a result.  The process is exactly the same as boiling water on a stove.  Vehicles with a two-line fill procedure do not use an economizer because they have lower heat gains (due to better insulation) and the fill procedure returns the tank temperature back to about -240°F (due to the Joule-Thomson Effect) but pressurizes the tank to 45-80 psi (as required by the fuel system), which negates the need for an economizer.  In either case, venting is minimal or zero for vehicles in continuous use.

Please feel free to read earlier postings in this discussion and follow the links for more information.

Comment by Tom Bailey on July 29, 2011 at 5:45am

Very good news.

Thanks for the quick response and concern.

Best; Tom

Comment by Brian Carpenter on July 27, 2011 at 4:05pm

Tom,

 

I just had a conversation with a guy who knows this industry pretty well.  He says boil off is not an issue unless the vehicle sits for a couple of days, so it looks like if you burn the fuel quickly, you get no appreciable loss of fuel.  That's good news.

Comment by Brian Carpenter on July 26, 2011 at 11:14pm

Tom,

I don't know the answer to that question.  It will depend somewhat on the outside air temperature and other factors. Some of the boil off gas can be used to keep the LNG cold, which is called auto refrigeration.  I do know that the tanks vent at around 50 psi, and then you have another problem of what to do with the vented gas.  The EPA is unlikely to let you vent it out in to the atmosphere on a regular basis.  There is a new technology being developed at the University of Missouri that uses corncobs that have been turned into charcoal.  Through a process called adsorption, the charcoal can soak up 128 times its own volume in natural gas at 500 psi, so you might be able to find a way to take the boil off gas and store it in a tank filled with charcoal and then either use that to run the vehicle or sell it back to the natural gas supplier at each fill-up.  Or you might be able to run the Reefer unit in the trailer off of it or something like that.

 

Comment by Tom Bailey on July 26, 2011 at 7:00pm

Question;

How much are you loosin as you are truckin down the road in regards to the heat and boil off issue?

R you saving?

Tom

Comment by Brian Carpenter on July 26, 2011 at 1:31pm

Clean Energy Group and Chesapeake Energy just signed a contract together a couple of weeks ago to put in 150 LNG stations "where demand warrants."  They are going to be installing these at Flying J truckstops.  But LNG (liquified natural gas) is different than CNG.  The liquified gas is at -260 degrees or so.  It's pumped into specially insulated tanks on the vehicle, but you can't store it for very long.  It warms up and "boils off," turning back into a gas.  So you've gotta fill up the tank and get back on the road and burn the stuff pretty quickly or it all evaporates.  The good news is that the tanks can be smaller and cheaper than CNG tanks.  OTR trucks are a good candidate for this technology.   Some school bus fleets are using it.  

 

The other big problem is a twofold problem.

 

1.  As near as I can tell the dedicated CNG trucks use engines that are 100% torn down and rebuilt.  They put in different pistons to reduce the compression ratio.  They rework the head to add spark plugs, and they add a spark timing mechanism.  This costs around 30K per vehicle and when you're done you've got what? An engine that's basically a really heavy and really expensive gasoline engine that you then put natural gas into.  It messes with the physics and you lose a lot of the advantages of a diesel.  I haven't been able to figure out why anyone would do this.  It doesn't make economic sense. I think there must be some sort of subsidy or tax credit that's motivating this.  But that's not a viable model going forward.

 

2.  The diesel/CNG blending technologies are awesome.  You can run up to 85% CNG/15% diesel.  I talked to a man yesterday who designs and sells these kits for small diesels and he's run 165K mi on a converted bifuel Duramax.  He regularly gets 60 mpg+ on the diesel side and about 20 mpg + on the CNG side.  100 mpg diesel side is possible when there is a really light load on the engine.  He says he runs a 1 micron oil filter and has NEVER CHANGED HIS OIL.  He sends samples of it to a lab in Cleveland for analysis, but thus far it is still within specs.  Think about that, diesel owners. No oil change for 165K miles.

 

But the CNG tanks are bulky and figuring out where to hang them on a Freightliner without sacrificing diesel fuel storage space is difficult. The EPA regs aren't super clear to me concerning these diesel conversions.  I've actually got a call in to the EPA to ask some questions.  Nobody wants to mess with the EPA.  Their regs are complicated and difficult to understand.  If you screw up they can drop the hammer on you in a very ugly way.  That can ruin a business. And a life. 

 

So there is a chicken and egg phenomenon.  Why spend a hundred thousand dollars on a fueling station when there aren't very many LNG or CNG trucks to buy the fuel, and you can't store the fuel for very long or you get the same kind of boil off problem that you get in the vehicle tank?  And why buy the LNG or CNG trucks for your fleet when there aren't very many places to fill them up?  

 

Getting this started is either going to take government subsidies (which I generally do not support as a concept, though there are some times when they do make sense) or an economically viable model and a restraint on and further clarity from the regulatory bodies.

Comment by Frank on July 11, 2011 at 12:02pm

The conversion of over-the-road diesels cannot happen without a refueling infrastructure.  Currently, LNG refueling is generally available to fleets with a central terminal so that the vehicles are refueled with LNG when they return to their home base.  There are a some LNG public stations in the Greater Los Angeles Area (GLAA) but very few elsewhere.  It is easier to get LNG at nearly the wholesale price (currently around $4/MCF or $0.527/DGE) if the fleet deals directly with the producer.  Public stations are typically priced much higher so that $2.20/gallon of LNG costs about $3.81/DGE, which isn't much of a savings since diesel currently costs about $3.99/gallon in the GLAA.

There are two types of LNG Conversions for heavy duty diesel trucks:  Spark ignition and diesel-LNG dual fuel.  Diesel-LNG conversions require both fuels on-board.  Spark ignition conversions replace the diesel engine with a spark-ignition engine so the truck burns only LNG.

See Natural Gas for Vehicles for more information.

Comment by David Ruggles on July 11, 2011 at 8:44am

How does conversion of over the road diesels happen without a refueling infrastructure?

 

Also, I understand that current technology for conversion requires a truck to carry both diesel AND natural gas fuels.  Is this correct?

Comment by Frank on May 27, 2011 at 12:52pm

The Pickens Plan seems to be getting closer to being enacted into law with the Natural Gas Act.  The plan put forth by Pickens to reduce America's dependence on OPEC oil relies on the replacement of the heavy duty diesel truck fleet with LNG-powered trucks.  Since there has been very little discussion here about actually converting fleets to LNG by truckers and fleet managers, it doesn't seem as if Pickens has them on-board his Plan yet.

Whenever I see T Boone Pickens in an interview, he often brings up the low cost of natural gas (lately, $4/MCF compared with 7 gallons of diesel costing $30).  Does the trucking industry really expect he'll be selling LNG for $4/MCF (~$0.54/DGE) at his Clean Energy Stations or would it more like about $0.50/DGE less than the going price for diesel?  Does LNG have a reasonable payback with a savings of $0.50/DGE over diesel or will it only work with huge federal subsidies?

Although there have been issues with using LNG in fleets, there have also been LNG success stories.  Does the lack of discussion just have to do with the trucking industry's resistance to change (see Swift & TA - TruckerDesiree post 4/6/2011) or is there a fear of an LNG project becoming a fiasco?

Comment by Aaron Black on March 26, 2011 at 1:14am

I was reading through the complaints about the cost of converting to CNG for the trucks.  This I really don't think is a real issue.  I know of diesel power plants that were converted over to Natural Gas back in the late 70's and early 80's.  The cost was minimal according to the power companies, and the end result was that they not only ran cleaner, but they also had lower maint. costs and the cost of running then generators was low enough that even coal fired power plant options were not really an option.  I have seen this in several towns who have their own piston engine power plants.  I have not had the time to do all the research on the conversions for trucks, but I would think that it would not be that bad overall.  And for those wanting to keep their diesel, they do run on BIO quite well.  There are several companies who are doing that now.  Diesel designed them to run off of raw peanut oil, and there is a LOT of waste cooking oil in the US alone.  So if anything, split the difference for a while, get better collections of oil, put the bucky ball in the engine oils and other bearing lubricating oils.  We have the technology to make everything work so much better, and so much faster, let alone even keeping clear of fossil fuels.  There is even a microbe now that produces an oil like diesel, we just have to figure out a way to get it cleanly off the surface of the water it is created on.  As for electricity, I would love to have a wind generator, and solar for electricity and for heating and even for cooling.  We can go completely green, and even have some of the green products help clean the air.  My thought is STOP complaining, we can do it, so lets find a cheaper way to do it.  It would make my day, I am tired of overpaying for everything, especially when our economy is so poor that I struggle just to have food for my daughters and grandson.

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