ACT Expo 2014 Sees Strong Attendance and Broad Platform for Alternative Fuels, Technologies

Alter­na­tive, clean trans­porta­tion appears to be gain­ing sup­port – as evi­denced last week dur­ing ACT Expo 2014 at the Long Beach, Calif., con­ven­tion cen­ter. Now in its fourth year since incep­tion, the conference’s atten­dance was up – per­haps as many as 4,000 atten­dees, mak­ing it the largest event of its type in the US and per­haps the world. ACT Expo keynote speak­ers, work­shops, ride and drive, and an expanded exhibit hall, fea­tured the lat­est in alter­na­tive fuel vehi­cle tech­nol­ogy, the reg­u­la­tory envi­ron­ment, and cost-benefit analy­sis by fleets.

ACT Expo has become some­thing of a broad plat­form for fuels, vehi­cles and tech­nolo­gies of all types to be well rep­re­sented, and for stake­hold­ers in these indus­tries to net­work. The Amer­i­can Truck­ing Asso­ci­a­tions worked with orga­niz­ers of the event for the first time this year; NAFA Fleet Man­age­ment Asso­ci­a­tion also played a key orga­niz­ing role along with the US Dept. of Energy’s Clean Cities, the US Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA), and the EPA’s Smart­Way Trans­port Partnership.

Another inno­va­tion launched this year was co-located events. Propane Edu­ca­tion & Research Coun­cil was one of the lead­ing spon­sors of the event and held its “Lead the Way” propane auto­gas sum­mit; NGV Global held its annual con­fer­ence in tan­dem with ACT Expo and led a Tech­ni­cal Forum; Cal­i­for­nia Hydro­gen Busi­ness Coun­cil held its spring sum­mit there; “Alter­na­tive Fuel Toolkit for Local Gov­ern­ments, Fleet Man­agers, and Employ­ers Work­shop” was pre­sented by another lead­ing spon­sor, South Coast Air Qual­ity Man­age­ment Dis­trict; and “Women in Alter­na­tive Clean Trans­porta­tion Sum­mit” was orga­nized by ACT Expo man­age­ment firm Glad­stein, Nean­dross & Asso­ciates. There were a few field trip events coor­di­nated with ACT Expo as well, includ­ing a heavy-duty nat­ural gas tour with site vis­its to the Clean Energy sta­tion at Port of Long Beach and the Waste Man­age­ment Car­son sta­tion fea­tur­ing LNG and CNG fueling.

The kick­off keynote speaker dur­ing Tuesday’s lun­cheon was Den­nis Sla­gle, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent group truck sales & mar­ket­ing Amer­i­cas, Volvo Group. The truck man­u­fac­turer aims to be the world leader in sus­tain­able trans­porta­tion through its Volvo, Mack, UD, Pre­vost, Novobus, and other heavy duty truck and bus brands. Volvo oper­ates a com­pre­hen­sive green vehi­cle port­fo­lio in trans­port with nat­ural gas, clean diesel, dimethyl ether (DME), and bi-fuel vehi­cles. Volvo is work­ing with Cum­mins on bring­ing in a 13 liter LNG engine next year. Sla­gle called for a com­mon sense reg­u­la­tory approach in Wash­ing­ton, and asked for renewal of expired tax incentives.

Erik Nean­dross, CEO of event orga­nizer Glad­stein, Nean­dross & Asso­ciates, led a panel right after Slagle’s pre­sen­ta­tion fea­tur­ing promi­nent lead­ers in the indus­try. Clean Energy Fuels pres­i­dent and CEO Andrew Lit­tle­fair gave some inter­est­ing sta­tis­tics includ­ing heavy duty trucks using 25 bil­lion gal­lons of nat­ural gas last year, tak­ing the lead, by far, as a user cat­e­gory. There are 19 mil­lion nat­ural gas vehi­cles in oper­a­tion glob­ally today, but only 142,000 are in the US. There is a lot hap­pen­ing out there, and Lit­tle­fair made ref­er­ence to super­mar­ket giant Kroger’s announce­ment that day on how it replaced 40 diesel trucks with that same amount of LNG trucks in Oregon.

Propane Edu­ca­tion & Research Coun­cil (PERC) pres­i­dent and CEO Roy Willis said that in addi­tion to light and medium duty trucks, propane is being widely used in mate­r­ial han­dling, gen­er­a­tors, irri­ga­tion, and land­scap­ing (such as mow­ers). There are about 600,000 propane-powered fork­lifts in oper­a­tion in the US. There are about 140,000 propane-powered pas­sen­ger and com­mer­cial vehi­cles on US roads; as for sales, there were about 14,000 units sold in the US last year (about half OEM and half con­ver­sion); 75% are light duty (mostly pick­ups and police cars) and 25% are medium duty includ­ing school buses. PERC fore­casts that there will about 18,500 propane auto­gas vehi­cles sold in the US this year and about 25,000 in 2015. In a sep­a­rate inter­view, Willis said there’s a strong sense of momen­tum being expe­ri­enced in propane auto­gas, even with expi­ra­tion of the fuel tax credit at the end of 2013. Direct injec­tion engines are hold­ing a lot of promise; Willis talked about the PERC project with South­west Research Insti­tute, Ford, Gen­eral Motors, and Hyundai on direct injection. Read more here.