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Thursday, December 04, 2008
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Filed Under: Green Living, News, Parking and Traffic
Between Mister B's declaration that "Living in Glendale Will Save the Earth" and all these posts on Green Living lately, I've been thinking that this blog has become prone to gross exaggeration, particularly when it comes to Glendale and the eco-friendly movement.But did you see the following announcement on the Los Angeles Times site?:
Clean Energy Fuels Corp. said today it plans to open a compressed natural gas station at the Glendale train station off San Fernando Road by summer 2009. The station will be open to the public and also service the city of Glendale’s CNG-powered Beeline buses and its growing fleet of CNG-fueled trash trucks....I don't know what "natural gas" is exactly, and I'm too busy this morning to look it up (maybe I'll go to the Wikipedia page later?), but this sounds good for the environment, doesn't it? And the fact that Glendale has been chosen as one of the cities to be at the forefront of the movement is pretty damn cool.
Seal Beach-based Clean Energy, co-founded by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, is a major local operator of CNG stations open to the public, with about 20 in the Los Angeles area and north Orange County....
Natural gas costs the equivalent of about $1.65 a gallon at Clean Energy stations. That's cheaper than the $1.95-a-gallon statewide average for regular gasoline, although CNG's price advantage has narrowed considerably as gasoline prices have plummeted.
(On a side note: There's a train station in Glendale?!)
Natural gas is the exact same stuff that probably runs your stove. It's mostly methane and, when used as a vehicle fuel, is compressed to a high pressure (3600 psi) to increase the amount the vehicle can hold in its tank. The engine is almost entirely the same as a regular internal combustion engine, except the fueling system is obviously different as well as a few minor tweaks so maintenance isn't difficult. I've been driving a CNG-powered Honda Civic for four years and the experience is exactly the same as a gasoline powered car - just with vastly reduced emissions.
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