Posts Tagged ‘CAR’
AT&T Rewarded for CNG Program
Monday, October 12th, 2009
AT&T was recently recognized for its concentrated effort to encourage the use of natural gas in its fleet vehicles and educating the public on the benefits of alternative fuels. The telecommunications giant was one of five recipients of the National NGV Achievement Award at the Natural Gas Vehicle Conference-Summit in Long Beach, California.
After conducting a thorough investigation of natural gas vehicle options, benefits and availability, AT&T decided in 2008 to field test 25 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)-powered installation-and-service vans in several of its California locations. After deploying the units and evaluating their performance, AT&T announced in early 2009 that it would replace approximately 8,000 gasoline-powered service vehicles with vehicles powered by CNG over the next five years. The company plans to deploy 15,000 alternative fuel vehicles by 2019. BAF Technologies also announced June 30 it would help AT&T with the conversion to compressed natural gas. The Center for Automotive Research (CAR) estimates AT&T’s CNG vehicles will save 49 million gallons of gasoline and reduce carbon emissions by 25 percent over its 10-year implication. Ranked No.1 on Automotive Fleet’s Top 300 Commercial Fleets of 2009 based on size, AT&T operates 86,099 vehicles in its fleet.
Photo courtesy of ecastro under the Creative Commons License.
Tags: AT&T, Automotive Fleet, BAF Technologies, CAR, Center for Automotive Research, compressed natural gas, National NGV Achievement Award, Natural Gas Vehicle, Natural Gas Vehicle Conference-Summit
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New Study Shows Massive Impact of “Going Green” with Fleets
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
A new report by the Sustainable Transportation and Communities group at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), a Michigan-based nonprofit research group, has examined the benefits of converting business fleets from gasoline to alternative-fuel vehicles such as compressed natural gas and gas-electric hybrids.
The main idea that the report supports is that turning corporate and other business vehicle fleets “green” provides the opportunity to put large numbers of more environmentally friendly vehicles onto the roads at once. The results of doing so would be both environmentally and economically positive.
Replacing 15,000 current gas-powered fleet vehicles with gas-powered and hybrid vehicles over a 10 year period could reduce gasoline consumption by more than 49 million gallons and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 211,000 metric tons in that period. Those reductions would be the same as simply removing 38,000 gasoline powered vehicles from the road for an entire year.
The CAR study used AT&T’s vehicle replacement program as a case study for their report. The AT&T program will also help to support an average of 1,000 vehicle manufacturing jobs each year until 2013.
“This example of corporate leadership, if followed by a significant portion of other public and private fleets, could have a huge impact on the release of greenhouse gases and significantly reduce the dependence on foreign oil,” said Kim Hill, director of the Sustainable Transportation and Communities group at CAR and the study’s lead. “For example, the emissions equal to 600,000 vehicles and the consumption of 15 million barrels of oil could be eliminated if 25% of the fleets had similar programs. In addition, demand for these types of advanced technology vehicles by the nation’s fleets could spur a growth in domestic green jobs.”
If the country is serious about increasing the number of fuel-efficient vehicles on the road in the near future, the fleets of America represent the best opportunity in the shortest timeframe, Hill said.
Photo courtesy of CLF under the Creative Commons License.
Tags: alternative-fuel vehicles, AT&T, CAR, Center for Automotive Research, gas-electric hybrids, Sustainable Transportation and Communitites group
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