Federal legislation to transition the country’s heavy-duty trucks to natural gas is building momentum in the United States Senate. Presently, the NAT GAS Act enjoys enormous bipartisan support in the House with almost 150 sponsors from both sides of the aisle. The Senate has been slower to respond, but according to the Energy Washington newsletter, that is now changing. The country’s dangerous dependence on oil is leading many Senators to shift their support to domestic natural gas:
Natural gas vehicle provisions are included in key climate and energy bills being considered in the Senate and an influential environmental think tank released a report recently that says a “mandate” to manufacture trucks that run on natural gas, along with policies on efficiency and other energy issues, could make significant headway in reducing U.S. oil consumption.
The proposals for natural gas vehicles stem from a plan offered in 2008 by oilman turned wind and natural gas advocate T. Boone Pickens that calls for replacing natural gas power generation with wind power generation produced along a massive wind corridor across the middle of the United States. The natural gas could then be used to power natural gas vehicles.
In a broad June 23 report laying out various energy policy options for meeting President Obama’s goals of simultaneously reducing oil use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the environmental think tank Resources for the Future (RFF) finds that a mandate requiring natural gas heavy-duty trucks would significantly reduce oil consumption. While the group stresses that a combination of policies would be most effective, the report notes that the “largest oil reductions come from our aggressive scenario mandating penetration of heavy-duty trucks fueled by liquefied natural gas [LNG] into the U.S. fleet,” gradually rising to 100 percent in 2020. Such a policy would deliver over a 2 million-barrel-per-day reduction in oil use in 2030, the report states.