UPS making the switch to natural gas vehicles

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix:
United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS), the world’s largest package-delivery company, said it can save 40 percent in fuel costs by running its long-haul semi-tractor trailer fleet on natural gas instead of gasoline or diesel.

UPS is reducing gasoline and diesel use to cut emissions and operate more efficiently, Scott Wicker, the Atlanta-based company’s chief sustainability officer, said in an interview Thursday. The company wants to reach 1 billion miles (1.62 billion kilometers) driven by alternative or advanced-technology vehicles by 2017, up from a previous target of around 400 million, it said today in its sustainability report.

“It’s really the vehicles that are on the freeways that burn the most fuel,” Wicker said. “Right now natural gas is the big game changer.”

Transportation: CenterPoint adding natural gas vehicles to its fleet

Earlier this year, UPS said it would buy almost 1,000 liquefied natural gas, or LNG, tractors in the next two years to boost its fleet of 2,700 alternative fuel and advanced-technology vehicles. It’s adding LNG refueling infrastructure with partners in the U.S. Southwest and buying electric trucks, which work best in densely populated areas, Wicker said.
...
I think UPS has the perfect business model for making the switch to natural gas.  It can build fueling facilities at its hubs for trucks that return to base every evening.  It also can schedule its long haul routes so the trucks can refuel as they deliver to regional hubs.   The 40 percent savings on fuel cost whould quickly repay the cost of infrastructure and equipment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more