United Parcel Service has ordered 200 hybrid electric trucks and 300 compressed natural gas vehicles from Daimler as it seeks to make its delivery fleet more fuel efficient.

Daimler said the order represents the largest ever placed for "green" commercial vehicles. Retail value of the trucks has been estimated at $50 million.The chassis will be supplied by Daimler's Freightllner subsidary, the hybrid systems by Eaton Corp.

In addition to helping US "green" its fleet and cut its fuel bills, use of the trucks throughout the U.s. fleet could help spread awareness of alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles.

The hybrid delivery trucks, which combine a diesel engine and electric motor, achieve 40 percent improvement in fuel economy and a 90 percent reduction in emissions compared to non-hybrid UPS vehicles, Daimler said.

The CNG trucks produce about 20 percent less carbon dioxide and other emissions than diesel-powered trucks.

The vehicles will be used by UPS for daily delivery operations across the United States and will function in concert with the package service's fleet of conventional diesel vehicles, UPS said in a statement.

The 200 hybrid electric vehicles, which will be deployed next year, are expected to save 176,000 gallons of fuel annually. The 300 CNG trucks  will enter service later this year.

The order will raise to 2,218 -- slightly more than 2 ppercent -- the number of low-carbon vehicles in the 93,000-truck UPS fleet.

Scott Doggett, Contributor

If a $2,500 car from India isn't enough for automakers to worry about, Tata Motors now says it will develop an all-electric vehicle to compete in the upcoming automotive X-Prize competition.

The contest, underwritten by Progressive Insurance, is offering a $10 million purse to contestants who can come up with a new car that is suitable for mass production and can achieve fuel economy equivalent to 100 miles per gallon or better. Entrants also have to have a business plan for making and marketing their vehicle.

Organizers hope the competition will showcase viable alternatives to the internal combustion engine as well as technologies that improve ICE performance and reduce emissions.

Tata, best known for the four-seat Nano "people's car" that it introduced at the New Dehli auto show earlier this year and has said will sell for the equivalent of $2,500, actually plans to enter two vehicles in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize competition, the Santa Monica-based X-Prize Foundation said this morning.

Continue reading...

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

LAS VEGAS, Nevada --Energy gazillionaire T. Boone Pickens has been singing a variation of the same song for several years now, but it's a tune worthy of repeat play:  The planet, says a man who made billions in petroleum exploration and ought to know his stuff, is using more oil than it produces, the situation isn't going to improve and nobody's doing much of anything about it.

"America is in a hell of a bad spot," he said in a presentation Tuesday at the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles annual conference here.

Without a radical reduction in the nation's appetite for imported crude, which now accounts for 72 percent of our total daily consumption, "we are going to be reduced to something less than the superpower we are now."

For Pickens, who has become one of the country's biggest backers of wind energy and of natural gas as a transportation fuel, the cure is painful but necessary.

We must cut back on the use of oil for automotive fuels and shepherd in a rapid and widespread adoption of domestically produced alternative fuels, he said,

Pickens, who left the oil exploration business in 1996 to set up his BP Capital Management investment company and, it turned out, to become one of the nation's biggest alternative energy boosters, has big holdings in natural gas and, not coincidentally,  believes it to be the best interim solution on the transportation side of things.

"Everything" from propane to biofuels will have a place in the effort to reduce oil consumption, he said, but available supplies of domestically produced natural gas are the largest "alternative" energy source around and, if used entirely for transportation fuel, could reduce oil imports by 38 percent.

Continue reading...

Gorton Vallely stands with his company's prototype battery-electric, medium-duty truck at Alternative Fuel Vehicles show.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada --The Detroit Auto Show this year had a herd of diesel concepts, a few hybrids and a host of muscle cars, typical fare these days for a mainstream auto show.

Absent was much of anything to do about other "today" alternatives to gasoline, leading people who are concerned about the auto, the energy sector and the environment to wonder what the automakers are up to and why they aren't moving faster to throw off the yolk of demon oil.

Can't answer that question. If I could I'd be out making millions as a highly paid consultant and seer instead of sitting in front of my computer in a 'Vegas hotel room overlooking the scenic roof of the power plant that keeps the casino chilled.

But I can suggest that for every innovation we don't see coming from our mass market automakers there's a small business out there somewhere hoping to offer up a solution.

Many of them are serving the fleet business – the trucking, bus and taxi companies that buy lots of relatively expensive equipment, are subject to strenuous emissions regulation in most states and bleed profits every time the price of gasoline or diesel goes up even a penny a gallon.

Walk around the showroom floor at the annual Alternative Fuel Vehicles national conference here this week and you see that can do spirit everywhere.

Continue reading...

GM's Equinox Fuel Cell Vehicle in "stealth"  garb for publicity-shy celebs.

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

It's been almost two weeks since we took GM's fuel cell Equinox for an extended spin – the first loan of one of the hydrogen-powered cars to a journalist, the company says.

(Yes, we're bragging, but we also mention that because, well, because we're bragging.) 

Anyhow, time to stop dithering and start reporting.

The news is that, I'm happy to report, the Equinox Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle, or FCEV, is quite a bit faster than GM publicly admits (more about that a little later) and is as comfortable and driveable as I'd remembered from a short spin during a press event back in October.

I'd been bugging GM for months to let us have one to use for a week or so we could see how it stood up to the daily grind in Southern California traffic with a variety of drivers from the Edmunds stable behind the wheel.

That hasn't happened – the hydrogen station being built near our office in Santa Monica hasn't opened yet and GM won't let us have one for a prolonged period until there's fuel nearby.

But the company did agree to let Green Car Advisor have one overnight, with restrictions – no refueling, so no long trips.

Continue reading...

Audi sees "great opportunities" in electric vehicles and will offer battery-electric automobiles with no exhaust emissions within ten years, its top executive told a German weekly.
 
Chairman Rupert Stadler, in an interview with Welt am Sonntag published Sunday, said he expects diesel and battery technology to be a dominate force the automotive market in five to ten years.

"By then we will offer cars without exhaust emissions," Stadler said.

Asked if Audi was trailing domestic rivals Mercedes-Benz and BMW in the development of  batteries to power electric vehicles,  Stadler replied that he wasn't worried, that Audi's research capabilities are larger than those of its competitors.

Continue reading...

It's starting to look as if corn-based ethanol's future is dimming, although corn futures – the kind traded in the commodities market  -- are still soaring.

Critics of using one of the world's basic food crops as a feedstock for fuel for cars and trucks have been scoring points in the debate over the past few months as prices of most grain-based and grain-fed foods climb. 

Many insist that using corn for ethanol – and diverting land once used for other crops in order to increase corn supplies – is a big factor in those food price increases.  the federal Department of Argiculture has estimated that corn ethanol and other biofuels are responsible for 20 percent of the food price surge.

On Monday, a group of 24 Republican senators – including GOP presidential candidate John McCain -- sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking that it alter rules that require a 400 percent increase in U.S. ethanol production  by 2022, to 36 billion gallons a year from just over 7 billion gallons last year.

The senators' letter says that the ramp-up should be reduced, or suspended, to put more corn back into the food chain, where it is used for animal feed, and to free up land now used for corn for increased production of cereal grains such as wheat.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also have said that government promotion of corn-based ethanol ought to be reexamined in light of soaring food price and sport shortages of critical grains.

Continue reading...

In what might be the ultimate cycle in recycling, Houston-based Waste Management plans to convert methane gas seeping from a landfill near San Francisco into superchilled liquefied natural gas to power its fleet of garbage trucks.

With the help of New Jersey engineering firm Linde North America, the Altamont Landfill will become the site of a 13,000-gallon-per-day LNG plant by 2009, Waste Management said.

Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, described the project as a "very significant step" towards helping the state achieve a production goal of 200 million gallons of clean transportation fuel each year from the garbage in California’s landfills.

Continue reading...

By Dale Buss, Contributor

With its second major equity investment in a biofuels startup company in the space of five just months, General Motors is moving front and center in what may become a pivotal global economic development of our time: the rapid rise of the cellulosic-ethanol industry.

GM’s announcement on Thursday that it has made an equity investment in a Boston-based company, Mascoma Corp., is a bookend to its January deal to help fund Coskata Inc., based in Warrendale, Ill.

The two companies, partially nurtured by academics, use two different processes to yield similar crucial results: the production of ethanol for fuel from non-grain, essentially waste sources.

Mascoma's single-step cellulose-to-ethanol method is called consolidated bioprocessing, which uses cellulosic biomass such as woodchips and switchgrass in a formula that lowers costs by limiting additives and enzymes that are brought into other biochemical processes. Mascoma expects to begin producing ethanol later this year at a demonstration plant under construction in Rome,  N.Y.

Continue reading...

Chemicals giant Monsanto Co. has teamed with a California firm, Mendel Biotechnology, to develop a strain of elephant grass native to China into a renewable feedstock for ethanol production.

The move is part of a growing effort to derive energy from cellulose -- the non-edible parts of plants – and comes, unsurprisingly,  just as Congress has earmarked cellulosic research for increased federal subsidies in the new farm bill wending its way through the legislative process.

The bill would increase subsidies for cellulosic ethanol and decrease subsidies for corn-based ethanol, which is being criticized in many quarters these days for diverting a basic food crop for energy production, thus diminishing global food supplies and helping to drive up the price of grain-based foods.

Continue reading...