Nonprofit group the American Clean Skies Foundation (ACSF) contends that a shift toward natural gas-fueled transportation in the U.S. will likely have a ‘minimal impact’ on the price of natural gas overall.
ACSF, whose board of directors includes Clean Energy Fuels Corp. CEO Andrew J. Littlefair and Robert A. Hefner III, founder and CEO of The GHK Companies, worked with Navigant Consulting Inc. on the analysis. The study used three scenarios to calculate potential natural gas demand and price impacts attributable to natural gas vehicles (NGVs).
‘We found that the estimated level of natural gas demand from NGVs, even under the most optimistic scenario, accounted for only about 2 percent of the overall market by 2025,’ says Gregory C. Staple, ACSF's CEO and co-author of the report.
‘And the incremental rise in fuel prices for this high-growth scenario was only approximately 25 cents per MMBtu, or 5 percent,’ he adds. ‘That's largely because we expect the growth in natural gas vehicles over the next decade to provide adequate time for supply and infrastructure developments to keep pace with demand, and thus to moderate any incremental natural gas price impact.’
The ‘optimistic’ growth scenario included high adoption rates of both light- and heavy-duty NGVs. In this scenario, the transportation sector's natural gas demand would grow from 57 billion cubic feet (Bcf) in 2013 to 711 Bcf in 2025, which equates to roughly 2.3% of total natural gas demand that year. The scenario estimated roughly 2.4 million NGVs on the road by 2025, of which 480,000 would be heavy-duty trucks.
The effect on 2025 natural gas prices across the scenarios ranged from an additional 3 cents to 27 cents per MMBtu, ACFS adds.
For more details, access the full report HERE.
