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TRANSCRIPT:

CAMPRIELLO:
Ford offered a modified natural gas pickup truck in the 1980s. Chrysler, General Motors and Honda were quick to follow, rolling out their own models over the next decade. Natural gas, which burns cleanly and emits less greenhouse gases than regular gasoline and diesel, looked like the fuel of choice. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 encouraged production of the natural gas vehicles, because it required that certain government fleets obtain alternative fuel vehicles. But obtaining the gas was a problem, and now, there is only one vehicle on the market that runs on compressed natural gas, or C-N-G. That’s the Honda Civic GX.

Jean Nonna test-drove a Honda Civic GX for three months in 2006. She immediately noticed a potential problem with the foot-and-a-half-wide gas tank.

AX 1: NONNA (6.3 seconds)
It’s in the trunk which…which limits the volume of the trunk, considerably.

CAMPRIELLO:
Nonna thinks her Civic lacked the pickup of other cars.

AX 2: NONNA (12.8 seconds)
You couldn’t go from one to sixty in five seconds–[laughs]–I don’t know what the…it’s a little slow on the uptake, but I wasn’t getting onto super-highways a lot.

CAMPRIELLO:
Nonna mostly drove her car near her Westchester County home, where we spoke. She filled up at a C-N-G station five miles from her house. She was lucky.

There are roughly twelve hundred public service stations offering C-N-G in the United States. They are heavily concentrated in California and New York. Even those are near urban hubs, like airports and major government or corporate offices, because delivery trucks, buses and other vehicles in a fleet travel short distances and can always refuel at a home base. A C-N-G car can be driven over two hundred miles on a full, eight-gallon tank of gas.

Nonna said because there are so few stations, she could not drive her car everywhere she wanted.

AX 3: NONNA (10 seconds)
I would have loved to take it up to Vermont to visit my mother, but I would have had to stop in Albany to fill up to go over to Vermont and then stop back in Albany to come down.

CAMPRIELLO:
What’s more, not all service stations are accessible to all drivers. Once, Nonna’s husband drove the car to Manhattan. He found that he could not access the C-N-G stations there without a key-card. He barely made it home to the C-N-G station near the house.

The New York State Department of Transportation has a fleet with roughly one-thousand natural gas vehicles, including one-third of its light-duty vehicles. But lately, replacing those vehicles has been difficult.

Joe Darling is the department’s Director of Fleet Administration and Support.

AX 4: DARLING (14.3 seconds)
We’re running into obstacles with the auto manufacturers with producing the autos that we need. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, none of them are currently producing a dedicated natural gas vehicle anymore.

CAMPRIELLO:
The scarcity of C-N-G stations lead to the discontinuation of those maker’s vehicles.

But there is a movement to convert diesel-running trucks to use natural gas. And C-N-G cars are beginning to attract individual drivers again.

Todd Mittleman, of Honda, says that the recent rise of gasoline prices has played a part in the trend; in New York, C-N-G costs around fifty cents less than regular gasoline. C-N-G vehicles are allowed to drive in carpool lanes. That’s attractive, too. And, the Federal Government offers buyers tax incentives for up to four thousand dollars. Without the incentives, the C-N-G Civic costs about seven thousand dollars more than a standard gasoline model. Mittleman says that individuals purchased almost half of the thousand C-N-G- vehicles his company sold in the model year 2007.

Honda and a partner have developed a device that connects a car to a home natural gas supply. So drivers don’t need to access C-N-G stations in order to drive locally.

But, Mittleman says, he hopes the automobile industry and the fuel industry can help each other grow.

AX 6: MITTLEMAN (18.2 seconds)
If theres more natural gas cars out there, if other manufacturers are making them, then there’ll be more call for infrastructure. And if there’s more infrastructure, then hopefully, natural gas cars will become more mainstream.

CAMPRIELLO:
An executive with a company responsible for City C-N-G stations agrees and thinks that public fueling stations will in time become more widespread.

Jean Nonna liked her Civic GX a lot, she said, but did not buy one. If there were more C-N-G stations to accommodate longer trips, her decision would have been different.

I’m Susan Campriello, Columbia Radio News.