A ribbon cutting in Mount Vernon on Wednesday marked the opening of a Trillium CNG™ Compressed Natural Gas public access station. The station is located at 1 Columbus Rd., and the event included an information session about CNG, as well as, remarks from Trillium CNG President Mary Boettcher and Karen Buchwald Wright, president and CEO of Ariel Corporation and others including President of Mount Vernon city council Bruce Hawkins.
Boettcher recognized Speedway LLC for their partnership in providing the station in Mount Vernon.
“This is our second station in Ohio,” said Boettcher, “and the second of what we hope to be many more to come as we achieve our Trillium mission of delivering safe, efficient, fast, convenient, and reliable compressed natural gas for heavy-duty transportation.”
She added, “And achieving our mission would not be possible without our partnership with Ariel, which goes way beyond the station which we have here today in so much as every compressed natural gas station skid that Trillium CNG builds today has at least one Ariel compressor on that skid.”
She also noted the ecological benefits of CNG as a transportation fuel and those benefits are also noted in the article at left.
Wright noted that Speedway will not operate the station but they will have a direct route from the CNG station to Speedway to purchase products from their store.
“If you think about the amount of money that has been invested in the gasoline and diesel infrastructure in the United States that maybe started in the 1930s and it took a long, long time to get to the size that it is,” she stated. “So what we’re trying to do with CNG, ‘we’ being the industry, is to really go a lot faster than 70 some years to build that infrastructure. And as mentioned a couple of times, CNG is more efficient, it’s cleaner, it’s domestic, it’s plentiful, it’s cheap—-there’s just nothing about it that’s bad. And the fact is that we are producing a tremendous amount of gas and we need a market for that gas. Part of that market will be electrical generation.
Wright added, “The United States, as a matter of fact, is the only country in the world today that is on track to comply with the Kyoto Accords, even though we didn’t sign that. And that’s because of fuel switching from coal to natural gas because we’re producing so much. So gas is a great fuel and as was mentioned, right now, it’s really good for big fleet type vehicles.”
Wright noted that Ariel had one CNG dedicated semi-truck on display. It was their first semi-truck. “We have three more on order. We wanted to prove it out. It’s working great; we really like it….So we will be using this station, probably on a daily basis.”
“We decided at Ariel that it was really important that we just not talk the talk, but that we walk the walk,” Wright continued, “so that’s why we really wanted to get this station going, why we’re supporting efforts for conversion, why we’re supportive of dual fuel, buying our own vehicles for that purpose and then the other thing that I really think is kind of cool. We don’t own this station, we’re not operating it, we’re just going to be a customer here; but just like they say in computer, ‘It has intel inside,” well this has Ariel inside. So it’s something to be really proud of.”
The event also held significance for a local Richland County business: North Central Insulation (NCI). NCI Sales Manager John Dudgeon had one of their four bi-fuel F-150s on display. The F-150 conversions done for them in Columbus cost approximately $10,000 per truck. Currently their trucks are based in Newark where a CNG station is located.
Of their conversion, Dudgeon stated, “For us, it just made sense for the lower cost of fuel. We were able to put it into a spreadsheet with how many miles we run and calculate the cost difference over four to five years.” What they observed was that CNG was much less than diesel and even the diesel parts were more expensive.
NCI also hopes to have their own private CNG station within two years. In the meantime, the Mount Vernon station will be the closest available station.
Knox Area Transit‘s Martin McAvoy attended the event and noted that they are considering, not whether they should convert to CNG, but how it will be funded. The rural transportation system’s 25 vehicles drive 500,000 miles a year and the fuel savings would be significant. Knox County Commissioners Teresa Bemiller and Roger Reed, who were also in attendance, agreed.
Ariel Corporation, located at 35 Blackjack Rd., Mount Vernon, produces natural gas compressors. By the end of this year they will have sold 50,000 natural gas compressors and they’re nearly 100 percent Ohio-made and nearly 1,600 employees.
Trillium CNG is a business unit of Integrys Energy Group and is the number two provider of compressed natural gas station services in America. Trillium is based out of Salt Lake City, Utah and Green Bay, Wisconsin and they design, build, operate, and maintain CNG fueling stations. They have 100 public or private CNG stations either operating or under contract.
Prior to the ribbon cutting, Ariel Corporation’s CNG Business Development Manager Brad Couch and Smith Dairy’s Fleet Manager Chuck Diehl each presented slide shows and discussed the benefits of CNG energy for transportation and for Ohio development. Their discussion is presented in a separate article at left.
