By Michael F. Carmichael
Oct. 6, 2011
What would link a Ford Mustang tearing up the track at a NASCAR event and a big yellow school bus picking up kids on a suburban street?
The link is Roush Enterprises – in the one instance, it’s their racing partnership called Roush Fenway Racing – and in the other, it’s Roush CleanTech, which is powering big yellow school buses and a bunch of other commercial vehicles with essentially zero-emissions propane autogas.
| Todd Mouw, vice president of sales and marketing for Roush CleanTech. |
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Roush CleanTech has been doing research and development on a number of alternative fuels including helping Ford (one of their main customers and partners) set a land speed record with a hydrogen-powered Fusion. “About five years ago we began looking at where we wanted to put our chips in the alternative fuels space,” says Todd Mouw, vice president of sales and marketing. “We liked propane a lot so, because this is clean technology, we named the division Roush CleanTech.” But, Mouw says, the name is generic enough to enable them to branch out into other alternative fuel technologies in the future.
Most of the alternative-fuel vehicles Roush is involved with – whether it’s those big yellow school buses or F-150 (or bigger) pickup-based commercial trucks – bear the familiar Ford Blue Oval (even if it’s under the hood and not on it).
“Fleets are most keenly aware of the need for alternative energy because they have the most vehicles and use the most fuel,” says Mouw. “They know they can’t afford to continue to be dependent on foreign oil. They want to be good corporate stewards and use a cleaner fuel that’s produced here in the United States. They understand the business case for propane now and it’s just a matter of beginning to roll it into their fleets.”
Who’s beginning to roll? National fleets like Frito-Lay and municipal fleets like Cincinnati and San Antonio – and other transportation providers such as school districts and mass transit systems. “They’ve run enough test vehicles to prove the economics make sense,” Mouw explains, “and after that they begin to preach the clean, green aspects of propane.”
What is propane autogas?
It’s actually a byproduct of the normal refining process that takes oil (from abroad or here) and turns it into gasoline. That pretty much ensures that, as long as we’re refining oil (or processing natural gas, another propane source), we’ll have propane autogas available as an alternative fuel source. It runs in gasoline and diesel engines with little modification – and the engines run cleaner, so there’s less maintenance expense and downtime for fleet operators. It produces slightly lower mileage but that’s more than overcome by other cost factors – especially the cost per gallon of propane autogas which can be as much as $2.00 cheaper than gasoline and an even bigger bargain when compared with diesel.