>Have you seen those new Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) hybrid buses whizzing by on the broad New York avenues? Well, probably not whizzing. More like crawling in bumper to bumper traffic. Either way, these new vehicles could be the transportation of the future for both corporate and government fleets. The Center for Automotive Research (http://www.cargroup.org/) released a study focused on the the potential petroleum savings and CO2 emissions reduction if such vehicles were used in fleets across the country.
To use an example from the Aftermarket Business website which reported on the study (http://aftermarketbusiness.search-autoparts.com/), if AT&T’s fleet of 15,00 vehicles were converted to CNG hybrid vehicles, 49 million gallons of gasoline would be saved and 211,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions would be spared over 10 years. That is the equivalent of taking 38,000 cars off the road every year. That could make up for some of the cars that are going on to Chinese and Indian roads. Not to mention that new technologies in rock “fracking” to get at potential new supplies of natural gas trapped beneath shale deposits in the U.S. could increase domestic energy supplies and reduce oil imports. All this talk of fleets and fracking makes me think I am in an episode of Battlestar Galactica.
