Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Roaring Fork Transportation Authority or RFTA provides mass transit to several areas
of Colorado, including Aspen, Glenwood Springs, Snowmass, Pitkin and Eagle Counties, Basalt,
and others. RFTA secured funding to begin a bus rapid transit system to provide faster,
reliable, convenient mass transit to its customers, and as a part of this plan they decided to
choose natural gas instead of diesel. This project is the first rural bus rapid transit
system in the country. It includes 22 new CNG buses, 3 CNG fueling stations, 1 that
is indoor. It received the White House Champions of Change Transportation Innovators Award,
and plans to convert all 92 buses are in the making.
This project is significant and progressive for many reasons, the first being that RFTA
operates at a very high altitude, often over 8,000 feet, and serves a very rural community.
The functionality of CNG buses was scrutinized because the nature of their routes required
large amounts of torque and power even at high elevation. After much testing and research,
the CNG buses outperformed its competition with acceleration and fuel economy. And after
calculating the fuel cost savings that result from cheap natural gas, the choice was simple.
Many things were special about this project, and Mike Golden of MW Golden Constructors,
who designed the fueling facility, took a moment to explain.
Our construction firm did the CNG fueling station here.
Okay.
Which is -- takes the fuel from a four-inch gas line that comes from down in the street,
brings it into the compressors, put it into storage spheres inside. Then those gas lines
run over to the Glenwood maintenance facility, and we have an outdoor fueling station right
there, where those three gentleman are standing, and then we have indoor fueling inside the
fuel bay. So at this particular facility, RFTA can fuel diesel inside and compressed
natural gas, which is abnormal in the country to have indoor fueling of CNG. In order to
do that, we had to harden the fuel bay so it could take a deflagration in case something
would go wrong. And on the north side of this fuel bay are deflagration vents that in case
of a deflagration, the vents would pop open, let the pressure out of the building so that
the building stands. All of the mechanical systems within the Glenwood maintenance facilities
were upgraded for CNG, so that if you get a CNG leak from working on the buses, the
systems will pull the gas out, open the overhead doors, shut down nonessential electrical systems.
And we also upgraded the electrical within 18 inches of the ceiling.
The project is incredibly significant to the state of Colorado. So much so that Governor
Hickenlooper made an appearance at the grand opening. Here are his remarks.
-- guys in just a second. But -- but having the BRT, the bus rapid transit up here, I
had a meal with Secretary Ray LaHood, who's gonna step down as the Secretary of Transportation
in the Obama Administration. And he was talking about this project, right. That nothing makes
a governor more proud than to have the Secretary of Transportation say, you know, "You -- do
you know these guys, RFTA? You know, kinda Pitkin County, Eagle County, Garfield County."
I go, "Oh yeah, I know those guys." He goes, "They're doing something no one else has done."
The compressed natural gas and this fueling station, again, there has been a revolution,
all this horizontal drilling and you know, we will get the regulations right. We will
continue raising regulations to make sure that there's not fugitive methane escaping
or that there's not spills of diesel oil or fracking or anything into our waters. We'll
get this right. But having inexpensive natural gas that is abundant and creates jobs here,
is cleaner, and is significantly less expensive than gasoline, that's not a bad thing. And
when you look at the potential -- I saw a map last week of the tight shales in China.
And if you believe -- if you're worried about climate change, I'm not saying you have to
be, but it's real.
I mean, it's -- climate change -- is happening. We can fight about the rate it's changing
or, you know, we can argue about how much of mankind's efforts are the cause, but it's
happening. Right? There's no more debate about that. And you could say, "Well, we can't change
it then." That's the other argument you hear. Well, you can change anything. Right? If you
look at the potential for natural gas to displace coal burning electrical generation in China
and do what it's done in this country, that is in real time the single most hopeful development
that we've seen in the last couple decades.
In this country, and people don't talk about it a lot, but not just in Colorado but across
the country, natural gas, because it is extensive so we know that the price isn't gonna be spiking
all over the place, but it is replacing coal in electrical generation all across the country
to the point where we have reduced carbon emissions on a per capita basis in the United
States to the same level they were in 1960. Right? So back when Eisenhower turned over
the White House to Kennedy. But we have also -- even though we never signed the Kyoto Protocol,
the U.S. is halfway towards compliance with Kyoto. And we have reduced our carbon emissions
more than all the other countries that did sign on to Kyoto, more than all of them combined.
Right? Again, in no way does it diminish the responsibility we all have to continue investing
with subsidies and research into wind, into solar.
I mean natural gas is gonna be a transition, right, over the next 10 -- probably 10 or
15 years, but we can't take our eye off the ball. We have to continue making those investments.
In the meantime, what you're doing here is a great model. I mean, again, cleaner, less
expensive, jobs here. We'll make sure we have the regulator environment to make sure we
protect the air and the water. It's almost a -- in those ways it's an opportunity that
really brings so many multiple benefits to it. And, you know, I asked some of the smaller
school districts all over the state. We should figure out how to do a refueling station like
this in centralized locations so that school districts can harvest some of that lower cost
and cleaner environmental consequences that natural gas brings. Again, what you're doing
here becomes a model and allows me, when I go around the rest of the state to talk about
what RFTA's doing.