Fitting Renewable Fuels into Your Fleet’s Sustainability Strategy

by Cambell Jones (ACT News) ... With growing pressure for fleets to slash emissions and deploy zero-emission vehicles, can renewable fuels still fit into an organization’s sustainability strategy?

Even with these factors aligning, deploying zero-emission vehicles is a long and complicated process. In fact, it is recommended that fleets begin to engage with their local utility as early as three years before they plan to deploy battery electric vehicles. In addition to a lengthy implementation timeline, electrification is also a very complex process, even for the most sophisticated fleets. Along with purchasing the actual vehicles comes applying for funding and incentives, identifying and installing charging infrastructure, creating a load profile and charging schedule with utility time-of-use rates, as well as training technicians, maintenance crew and staff.

And if these infrastructure and timeline challenges weren’t enough, the vehicle technology itself still poses a major challenge. While battery range is increasing, without widespread access to heavy-duty charging stations while out on routes, the battery electric vehicles currently available are only operationally suited for fleets with short, predictable, return-to-base routes and access to overnight charging.

In the meantime, corporate customers are still expecting, and now even requiring, fleets to provide substantial emission reductions today—not sometime in the distant future.

For these reasons and more, a fleet’s sustainability strategy does not need to focus on zero-emission vehicles alone. Natural gas vehicles can provide quantifiable emission reductions starting today while simultaneously helping fleets plan for the long term.

Natural gas vehicles and renewable natural gas are already an essential part of the emission reduction strategies for fleets with some of the most ambitious sustainability initiatives in place.

These same fleets have also set, and are continuing to meet, their ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction goals while reporting to some of the most stringent carbon accounting frameworks available. This is not despite their use of natural gas vehicles and renewable fuels, but in large part because of their use of NGVs and RNG.

As independently certified by the latest data from California’s clean air agency, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the carbon intensity of RNG produced from in-state dairy waste is negative 308.59 gCO2e/MJ compared to the carbon intensity of California’s electricity grid (one of the cleanest in the nation) which is 16.58 gCO2e/MJ. READ MORE