NGVs and Hybrids Move Ahead

Manufacturers of vehicles and fuel systems agree, and many are putting more effort into this growing market segment.

“The solid waste market, with regard to CNG or natural gas in general as a fuel, is one of the fastest-moving segments in the market we’ve seen today,” says William Zobel, vice president of business development for Trillium CNG. “Approximately 50% of all of the new refuse trucks purchased today are natural gas,” he adds.

Leadership has been exerted by Waste Management, Republic Services, Waste Connections, and others, Zobel points out. “The big boys are leading the way, and we’re seeing the conversion of that industry over to natural gas in a variety of locations,” he says. “There are places where it doesn’t make sense, but those are few and far between. Based on the economics, there’s a mass conversion in the space of compressed natural gas.”

According to Clean Energy, Waste Management pioneered the move to natural gas in California in 1998. In 2006, Smithtown, NY, was the first city in the East to require all refuse haulers serving the community to switch from diesel-powered to natural-gas-powered refuse trucks by January 2007.

If one aggregates the entire various vehicle manufacturers’ orders, an average of 40%-or approximately 3,000 trucks-are asking for the natural-gas lowcab-forward solid waste vehicles, Yborra says.

And while the “chicken and egg” debate continues as to what should come first-the CNG-enabled vehicle or the CNG fueling stations-municipal solid waste fleets are finding ways to adopt both simultaneously in their operations.

Waste Management is one of the industry leaders in the effort, with more than 1,700 CNG vehicles on the road and some 80% of the company’s new truck purchases are for natural-gas vehicles.

In constructing fuel stations to service those vehicles, Waste Management also has opened them to the public, as in the case of its 24/7 self-service CNG Clean “˜N’ Green Fueling Station in Pompano Beach, FL. Waste Management expected to have 45 CNG fueling stations in place by the end of 2012.

Vehicle manufacturers have produced a variety of options for MSW operations aiming to switch to natural gas.

The Mack TerraPro Cabover and Low Entry trucks are paired with natural-gas-engine manufacturer Cummins Westport to offer the MSW market an alternative in fuel choices. The trucks meet EPA 2010 and California Air Resources Board emissions levels. The trucks also have IRS certification for a Qualified Alternative Fuel Motor Vehicle Credit.

The TerraPro Cabover is used primarily in commercial operations, while the TerraPro Low Entry model’s low step height makes it a common choice for residential pickup.

“Natural-gas usage in the refuse industry has been on the leading edge of a “˜gasified’ America,” notes Curtis Dorwart, Mack Trucks vocational marketing product manager. “We’re using natural gas as a motor fuel as compared to diesel, which has been around for more than 100 years.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth in that particular segment here over the last few years and we perceive it’s going to continue so long as the price delta between diesel and natural gas stays about where it is, and that’s somewhere around $1.50 to $2 a gallon.”

That makes a “very strong business case” to go to a natural-gas-powered solution, he adds.

Dorwart points out that natural gas had started to gain traction in the 1990s, but lost steam when its price increased while diesel prices dropped down.

“That could happen again, but experts don’t seem to think so,” he says. “The industry is a little different now. Even if it does shift a little bit price-wise, we have the diesel engines these days with the required emissions control systems to maintain 2010 and forward. Compliance requires much more after-treatment in the use of diesel exhaust fluid for the SCR [selective catalytic reduction] technology.

“Gas engines do not require those more complicated after-treatment systems, so it’s a little more of a game changer in the industry today because of the complexity level for the diesel engine today versus yesterday as compared to a natural-gas engine of today.”

Because of the economics associated with that factor as well as fuel prices and because of the complexity level between a diesel and a natural-gas-powered truck, Dorwart says he believes natural gas “definitely has some legs to stand on, and industrywide you really can’t dispute the numbers.”

Another option is that offered by Effenco’s HEAD Hydraulic Hybrid System, designed specifically for solid waste industry trucks with auxiliary hydraulic equipment.

During braking, hydraulic pumps are used to slow down the vehicle, recovering kinetic energy that would be otherwise lost in heat. The recovered energy is stored in a hydraulic accumulator in the form of a pressurized fluid.

The HEAD system uses the stored energy to assist the engine when it is the least efficient: at idle while driving auxiliary equipment, such as the compactor or automated arm.

The system is modular and can be installed on new vehicles or retrofitted to existing trucks.

“We reuse the fuel consumption,” says Simon Poulin, Effenco’s sales director. “The tendency right now for the hybrid industry is to convert to a CNG truck. Our hybrid system is good for the CNG truck, since we reduce the fuel, extend the range of the truck, and at the same time reduce its impact on the environment.”

The system is designed to realize a 15% to 25% reduction in fuel consumption, increase brake life by a factor of three, reduce operating costs by up to $15,000 each year, and reduce the impact of fuel price variations.

Additionally, the system is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 tons per year and cut emissions of NOx particulates and SO2 by 20%.

For natural gas trucks, the HEAD system extends the range of vehicles equipped with CNG/LNG engine.

The HEAD system, with a parallel configuration, can be installed or retrofitted on any chassis. The operation of the regenerative braking is totally integrated within the conventional braking system.

The system is interactive as well. An onboard dynamic driving guidance interface provides feedback on driving efficiency to the operator.

Crane Carrier offers CNG alternate-fueled vehicles in its product line.

“We continue to see growing interest in CNG-fueled vehicles with a greater percentage of our production currently produced with CNG engines rather than current diesel technology,” notes Glenn Pochocki, national sales manager. “We also offer a hybrid technology produced by Eaton, the Hydraulic Launch Assist [HLA] system.”

Over the last few years, his company has seen interest moving away from ancillary hybrid devices, with customers seeking more integral parallel hybrid designs.

“The thought process is to identify a hybrid system that is more reliable, economical and transparent to the operator,” says Pochocki. “In the meantime, interest has moved on to CNG-fueled vehicles to reduce operating cost with lower cost fuels.”

To be certain, the price of fuel is a driving factor behind MSW operations converting to natural gas.

“As fuel prices remain high and income stagnates, people are resolving to do more with less. A simple solution to a significant cost is fuel,” says Mel Kurtz, president of quasar energy group.

“As gas and diesel continue to hover around $4 per gallon, natural-gas equivalent is less than $2. You can do more with less. As regulators recognize they are inhibiting CNG use and that even a mediocre CNG conversion is better for the environment, a more tolerant means of approving them has emerged.”

Photo: Quasar The need for CNG fueling stations is increasing dramatically in the US.

The availability of CNG fueling stations has been an issue over the years for municipal solid waste operations because of range, but is becoming less so.

Where CNG fueling stations are not available, municipal solid waste operations are constructing their own CNG fueling infrastructure. Time-filling (or slow fill) involves a slow fueling of the trucks with compressed natural gas while they are parked overnight, with truck fuel tanks being filled a few gallons per hour. Yborra says such stations are less expensive to install and work well for fleet operations that don’t aim to provide access outside their own operations.

For those that do, the fast-fill station-akin to any fuel station seen on a road-enables a municipal solid waste operation not only to fuel its own vehicles, but open up access to the public and thus generate a revenue stream. Smithtown, NY, has done so, according to Yborra.

About a dozen US cities have constructed their own fuel stations, but pay another company whose core competency is to operate them to do so, Yborra says.

“They guarantee the fuel and they pay someone to operate it and even sell the fuel to others,” he says. “They concentrate on their own core competency of running a fleet.”

One such company that provides turnkey services is Trillium CNG, a full-service compressed-natural-gas solutions provider for various fleets. The company provides equipment, engineering, design, operations and maintenance, transaction management, and even financial services for customers across the light-duty to heavy-duty spectrum.

Solid waste vehicles are “perfect vehicles” for CNG slow fill systems, says Tom Sewell, president of Tulsa Gas Technologies (TGT).

TGT manufactures dispensing systems for time-fill or fast-fill CNG refueling systems.

“Most of the vehicles we have experience with work within defined areas, and range has never been an issue,” he says.

The company’s fast fill dispensers come several sizes, including half-inch and three-quarter-inch tubing. The dispenser is sized depending on the size of the compressor station being used on the system.

In Oklahoma, TGT also sells and services CNG compressors.

“We will compress gas to 3,600 psi as a compression contractor where we compress a vehicle’s gas for a per diesel gallon equivalent [DGE] fee,” says Sewell.

Clean Energy builds and provides natural-gas fueling services for several market segments across the country, including solid waste. The company designs, builds, operates, and maintains CNG and/or LNG fueling infrastructure for the solid waste industry.

“It happens to be our fastest-growing sector with the adoption rates that are taking place right now,” says Christopher Logan, director of national accounts for the solid waste division for Clean Energy.

Logan says the driving factor is that, years ago, if a municipality didn’t tell a hauler or force its internal organization to do something “clean” for the environment, the industry had no traction.

“But in the last couple of years, with the advent of ISLG engine-and the introduction of that engine has changed quite a bit-it’s become an economics game,” Logan points out. “The engines several years ago had a significant price spread over diesel, anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000.

“Now some of the larger companies are paying just over $20,000 an engine. That sounds like a lot, but if they’re saving $2 a gallon and they’re burning 8,000 to 10,000 gallons per year on a truck and they keep these trucks anywhere from seven to 12 years, depending on what the entity is and what type of routes they’re running, it’s simply a matter of economics.”

Universal Air and Gas Products manufactures fueling station equipment such as fill posts and gas compressors. The company is a turnkey provider from design to installation.

Steve Davis, the company’s vice president of sales, says that, on one hand, the industry is quickly moving forward to a greater market penetration.

“There are some good equipment manufacturers and suppliers out there. The supply side is ready and prepared to handle anything that comes up. The market side is bursting at the seams,” he says.

On the other hand, there are 1,100 CNG stations and 3.7 million liquid fuel stations in the country, he points out.

“The government wants all state governments to have an alternative fuel plan in place that uses a domestic fuel for at least 10% of their fleets in the next several years,” Davis says, and the number of fuel stations that need to be in place to accommodate that is “huge.”

“The United States is really lagging in this,” says Davis. “We have almost all of the natural gas right now with the Utica Shale and the Marcellus Shale, and we were last in the countries listed with that kind of resource versus how many natural-gas vehicles we have.”

Nonetheless, industry observers point out that the solid waste industry is leading the way. Case in point: Chesapeake, VA, where the solid waste division recently initiated a plan to change its fleet of 53 diesel-fuel vehicles to CNG over time during the vehicles’ replacement schedule.

Fleet manager George Hrichak is saving “thousands of dollars” every month due to the conversion, Davis points out.

FirmGreen not only produces renewable energy, but also vehicle fuel for MSW trucks.

The company manufacturers a technology that converts solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbons from renewable resources such as landfill gas, forest residues, and biomass into renewable electricity and clean biofuels to power vehicles and fuel cells. The company also has wind and solar divisions. Steve Wilburn, president and CEO, says the market has been “exploding” in the past decade.

“When we’re looking at a potential municipal-solid-waste-to-a-renewable-electricity project, we often consider integrating several of our patented and proprietary technologies, and also produce renewable vehicle fuel in the form of CNG,” Wilburn says.

“First, we sort raw MSW and remove the organic material. Next, we feed the organic waste into our proprietary anaerobic digester. In the absence of oxygen, anaerobic bacteria will ferment biodegradable organic matter separated from the MSW into methane and carbon gases. We then clean the gases using our technology to produce food-grade liquid CO2 and pipeline-quality and fuel-grade methane.”

Wilburn says the biomethane from the process meets all of the standards to be injected into a natural-gas pipeline.

The biomethane from FirmGreen’s process can be compressed onsite into a biofuel product it calls gCNG.

“We use the CO2 from our process to beneficially grow algae,” says Wilburn. “The algae is then harvested to produce additional liquid fuel and the remainder is blended into our proprietary golf course fertilizers.”

Wilburn points out that in the natural-gas market “there are long-term hedges that are required for fleets, so we have technology in the gas fields and use the natural-gas markets to write long-term fuel contracts for fleets that want to convert to alternative fuel like compressed natural gas,” says Wilburn.

“We find sources of natural gas and enter into long-term transmission agreements, the pipelines from the source to the end-user, that allow us to blend in gCNG, and that is renewable content CNG,” he says.

The only credits available since 2011 for CNG fleets are renewable credits. Natural gas is an alternative, but not “renewable,” Wilburn points out.

“We give the fleet owners the ability to meet their conversion standards by being able to put into regular methane renewable methane, which is then renewable credits.”

FirmGreen is currently developing biomethane projects in the United States, South America, Myanmar, Puerto Rico, Turkey, and India.

A $100 million biogas plant near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that was expected to begin operations during spring of this year will produce up to 22 million gasoline gallon equivalents (GGEs) of fuel per year.

FirmGreen has been engaged in a study for the California Energy Commission taking the organic portion culled from raw municipal solid waste, digesting it and creating vehicle fuel.

The company expects to publish the data as an open source look at technology and the pathway proof of concept from beginning to end.

“The steps and the barriers are going to be examined of sorting the waste and then processing the waste, and what do you do with the digestate from this anaerobic process, which we’re going to use in our algae growth.

“When the algae is harvested, we’re going to take the lipid portion-the oil portion-and generate biofuel, and we’re going to take the remaining dry portion of the algae and that will be used in cattle feed.”

Companies such as FirmGreen must work with various laws that differ from state-to-state, such as in California.

“California has a lot of vehicles, so a lot of the focus is in this market,” Wilburn says. “California, for example, does not allow landfill-gas-derived biogas from entering into their pipeline distribution system. Other states do.

“In California, you can’t put biogas derived from anaerobic digestion into the pipeline. So we create a pipeline-quality gas for landfill gas; we also create pipeline-quality gas from anaerobic digesters.”

Looking ahead to 2020, Sewell expects high penetration of the conversion of solid waste trucks, transfer trucks, and many daycab vehicles to run the vehicles on CNG.

“The price of natural gas is so stable, and the customer has the ability to buy futures and hedge his fuel cost for many years,” says Sewell. “In the future, it makes perfect sense to build a business case to switch to CNG-powered vehicles.”

Poulin agrees cost reduction is a significant driving factor, and environmental concerns also play a large role.

“Reducing costs is to reduce the fuel consumption, but at the same time there is a pressure from the municipality to push for reduced greenhouse gas, so the industry is really looking to make sure they can reduce their environmental footprint,” he says. “I think it’s going to go toward that. We see everyday changes in the exhaust system or changing the fuel or adding a hybrid system like ours or all of the above.”

Until now, the demand for CNG fueling equipment was low enough to allow vendors to charge as if it were specialty equipment, notes Kurtz. “Meaning you order, pay 50% up front, another 30% prior to shipment-normally more than 90 days-and the balance upon delivery and installation,” he says. “That stood in the way of market development and growth.”

The same dispenser-quasar now manufacturers its own-is 50% less in cost and has the same components and safety features and can be delivered in 30 days, he adds.

“Compressors are also less expensive and, more importantly, they are appropriate for the application,” Kurtz says. “Storage vessels that were as much as the compressor unit and took six to nine months now are available in 30 days and are one-third the cost.”

Kurtz notes a significant increase of CNG stations, particularly in Ohio, “because of our significant energy consumption and now our natural-gas production resulting in more awareness and opportunity to benefit from it.”

The numbers support the various hypotheses about where the industry will be in 2020.

Of the large number of trucks that some of Clean Energy’s largest clients have planned to procure, one such organization has committed to 85% of its 2013 procurement cycle to encompass CNG, with another organization at 75%.

Logan says his company is seeing operations with large fleets at various locations replacing their trucks with CNG and installing the appropriate infrastructure, with CNG taking over the entire site through attrition as an economic measure.

“The cities love to see it because it’s cleaner and the corporate offices of these organizations love to see it because it’s cheaper,” says Logan.

Wilburn predicts there will be small regional projects as the technology emerges.

“When you move waste from the collection points where you pick it up and bring it back to a central location for processing and then do something else with it and then move it again from a recycling center or a MRF station all the way to the landfill, you ultimately add cost to each time you touch that waste,” he says.

Wilburn believes it’s more advantageous to process waste close to the source and generate biogas and/or electricity in that form rather than to aggregate in massive plants.

“Some will argue in this industry that bigger is better. I’m not one of those proponents,” he says. “I believe in regional: you make the waste, you deal with your waste and turn that waste into an asset. It’s a community-based responsibility program for custody of that ton of waste.

“You can derive benefits from recycling. We can come up with soil amendments, cattle feed, fuel for vehicles, and renewable electricity. It’s not nirvana, but it’s as close as I can think of to get to a closed-loop system for handling this waste.”

Still, there will alway