Usage of Non-Petroleum Fuels on the Rise, Yet Vehicle Sales Stall

by Braden Kelner (Power Source) Non-petroleum fuels are being used for transportation in amounts not seen in 60 years, according to federal data.

Alternative fuels — ethanol, natural gas and electricity — have more than doubled their share of the transportation sector since the mid-2000s and now make up 8.5 percent of the market, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But trends have changed in the last six decades. In the 1950s, the petroleum use soared along with the popularity of cars while the use of coal in locomotives declined. Now, growth in non-petroleum fuels is being spurred by federal mandates on alternative fuels.

Ethanol is now a standard addition to gasoline — about 13 billion gallons of ethanol were added in the U.S. last year, according to the EIA. The Environmental Protection Agency in May announced further goals to require refiners to up the use of biofuels to 16.3 billion gallons this year.

There are about 153,000 natural gas vehicles on U.S. roads, of which 87,000 are light-duty vehicles like passenger cars, mostly comprising business and government fleets, according to Natural Gas Vehicles for America (NGVAmerica), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization.

Overall, the production and sale of natural gas vehicles fell by 6.5 percent in 2014. While larger vehicles like shuttles, box trucks and garbage trucks sold well, producers sold only 6,650 light-duty vehicles in 2014, 3,500 less than in 2013, NGVAmerica noted.

“We don’t see a lot of interest in [natural gas vehicles],” said Jessica Caldwell, director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com, a website providing tools and analysis on buying vehicles. “[It’s] not something that is on consumers’ minds.”

Retail sales of electricity for transportation grew more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2014, according to the EIA. Operations related to railways and railroads make up a significant portion of these sales, but the report does not break down the amount of electricity used to actually power vehicles, as it does in the case for ethanol and natural gas.

While sales of fully electric and hybrid vehicles made up 3.3 percent of new car sales in the first quarter of 2014, they made up only 2.7 percent of sales in the same time this year, according to Edmunds.com.

In 2015, only 45 percent of trade-ins of hybrid or electric vehicles have seen swaps for other vehicles using alternative fuels, falling below 50 percent for the first time, Edmunds.com noted.

“People seem unwilling to buy a car that only goes 40 or 50 miles to a charge, even people whose commute is 8 miles,” said Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Nourbakhsh, the director of the university’s CREATE Lab, works to make electric vehicles more practical and affordable through a project called ChargeCar.