Natural Gas Station Expansion For Canada

With Natural Gas Hybrid Trucks becoming more prevalent on the roads today, Encana Corp has invested by building a refilling station for their heavy truck fleet 40 klm east of Calgary in Canada.

The station will eventually be open to the public, the company said. Encana has converted almost a tenth of its fleet of 1,400 commercial vehicles to using natural gas instead of gasoline or diesel fuel.

“This is intended to try to offer encouragement in a broader way for the concept of natural gas-powered vehicles,” said Mark Gilman, an analyst at Benchmark Co. LLC.

Proponents of natural gas as a transportation fuel, including oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, say it’s a cheaper and cleaner fuel that will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Burning natural gas emits about 25 percent less carbon dioxide emissions compared with gasoline, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The amount of recoverable natural-gas reserves in North America has swelled as a result of new techniques to capture hydrocarbons trapped in underground shale. Gas prices have dropped 72 percent from a record of $13.577 per million British thermal units in 2008.

Encana has compressed-natural-gas stations in Colorado, Louisiana and British Columbia. Canada has about 80 stations supplying the fuel to the public, the company said. There are about 1,100 stations in the U.S., according to CNG Now!, an industry-funded advocacy group.

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