A Conversation With ... Jonathan Gano

The city of Springfield’s $1.4 million compressed natural gas filling station opened in June 2012. The first within 90 miles of Springfield, the station was slated to serve roughly 20 vehicles for the Public Works Department, City Utilities and Greene County. Has the station seen a lot of other use thus far?
The station is working out very well. We have, through local funding and federal funding, both built the station and purchased an initial fleet, and the station has been in operation for just over a year. The station is open to the public and we have sold about half of our CNG gas for public use. It is a small market, but it exists.

This station was intended to solve the chicken and the egg problem. No one would buy a CNG car or truck if there was no place to fill it up, but nobody wanted to build a station without having customers to sell to. In the past year, we have sold 10,000 gallons of gasoline equivalent. That’s not a whole lot. I think some gasoline stations sell that much in a month, but we service a small fleet of dedicated CNG vehicles. There is a mix of publicly owned, bi-fuel vehicles the county highway department bought and other vehicles such as one CU owns. In the coming year, we are doing an early retirement of two dump trucks and converting their replacements to run on natural gas. The fuel savings are substantial. We pay $1.60 for a gallon of natural gas at our pump, compared to $3.50 a gallon for diesel. We run 150,000 miles on a dump truck over its lifetime. At a savings of $2 a gallon, it will add up quickly.

Have local business owners embraced the alternative fuel through investment in fleet conversion?
We have had some conversations with business owners exploring the options, but we have not yet had any jump in and make an investment decision to convert the fleet. We have a lot of pass-through owners, people from Oklahoma taking their CNG vehicles through to the east. The next closest station is in Miami, Okla. We were the missing link to permit that. There was a CNG wasteland in Missouri and you were unable to get a CNG vehicle through unless you had a side deal worked up with somebody in a garage somewhere. We also get a decent amount of traffic from commercial vehicles headed to Chicago and then our local customers.

What are benefits of a vehicle that runs on natural gas rather than unleaded?
There are tremendous air quality improvements, particularly when you replace diesel engines. The tailpipe emissions are so much cleaner. It’s about a 90 percent reduction in particulate matter emissions. Those are the ones that cause problems for people with asthma and contribute to air quality problems. There also is a noticeable reduction in carbon dioxide and a huge reduction in carbon monoxide.

There is a modest, but hardly noticeable, loss of performance. It used to be there was a very noticeable reduction in performance, but that isn’t the case anymore. To anyone who isn’t a race car driver, the performance is hardly noticeable.

Why is this station important for the city?
This helps develop alternatives to our traditional fueling sources. I don’t know that anybody knows what the fuel of the future is, but having another alternative available is useful. All of the natural gas we burn is domestically sourced. One hundred percent comes from right here in America. You can’t say that about gasoline and diesel. There is a hefty amount of import from places that don’t necessarily share our best interest.

What is the ultimate goal of this project? Are there any other stations in the works?
The city of Springfield only has this one station. We are continuing to transition more of our fleet to run on alternative gas. We will retain a presence for the foreseeable future of multiple fuel sources, kind of like anybody else interested in alternatives. We are letting the market develop to see what the future of fuels will be.

The city has already installed on electric car charging station at the Busch Building. Are there plans to add any additional sites around town?
CU is working on a place to install a charging station at the Heer’s car park downtown. The car park is owned by Public Works, but CU would install and operate the charging station there. They have started the engineering work with us.