ALTERNATIVE FUELS
technologyreview
Alternative fuels may someday
go mainstream, but truckers
want to make the shift on their
terms, not the government’s. power to the fleets
IF MARKET POTENTIAL WERE A YARDSTICK FOR COMMERCIAL SUCCESS, THEN ALTERNATIVE
fuels like biodiesel and natural gas would be a sure-fire winner. After all, who could argue with energy
sources that can be indigenously made from readily available materials, and, depending on the fuel,
could be less expensive than the traditional diesel fuel that powers the nation’s heavy-duty trucks?
Well, for one, the trucking industry might raise an objection.
Hard-bitten truckers who don’t have enough of a profit cushion to deal in abstractions say that alternative fuels, for all of their prospective benefits, do not now—and may never—give the industry the
same bang for the buck that traditional petroleum-based diesel fuel provides.
Richard Moskowitz, vice president and regulatory affairs counsel for the American Trucking Associations
(ATA), says, “They are called ‘alternatives’ for a reason. If these fuels performed better than petroleum-based
ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel, then most likely the industry would have embraced them voluntarily.”
So far, truckers’ pleas that fuel-usage decisions be left up to the fleets themselves and not to govern-
ment edict have fallen on deaf ears.
The industry currently faces government mandates that will force it to use more alternative fuels. By
law, truckers must increase their consumption of biodiesel to at least 1. 15 billion gallons in total for the
years 2009 and 2010 combined. The amount will rise to 1 billion gallons annually by 2012. In 2009, only
350 million gallons of biodiesel were consumed, according to data from the ATA, which represents several large private fleets along with its core membership of for-hire carriers. All told, the trucking industry consumed 34 billion gallons of fuel in 2009, the ATA said; in recent years, the total annual consumption has gone as high as 39 billion gallons.
