As Tulsa officials prepare to increase the city’s fuel budget by $1.1 million as a result of rising gas prices, Mayor Dewey Bartlett on Tuesday emphasized the city’s long-term commitment to use more compressed-natural-gas vehicles.
It would not only be cheaper, Bartlett said, but it would be better for the environment.
“We need to lead by example,” he said.
The mayor announced at a press conference the opening of a high-speed CNG fueling station in the city’s west maintenance yard at 420 W. 23rd St.
It can fuel two vehicles simultaneously and will serve the city’s 17 vehicles that run on CNG.
The station completes the first phase of an $875,000 project, funded with $477,000 from federal energy grants and money from the city and its trash authority. Five of the CNG vehicles are trash trucks.
Two other phases, including the construction of six CNG fueling points for the trash trucks and a retail CNG fueling station that will be open to the public, are coming up.
The public station also will be in the west maintenance yard and will be completed this year.
Bartlett said the project will allow the city to replace more of its 2,600 vehicles with ones that run on CNG.
“This is going to provide us with a lot of opportunities,” he said.
Compressed natural gas not only burns cleaner, helping the city avoid the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called dirty-air list, Bartlett said, but it is more economical.
If the city pays $3 per gallon for regular fuel, by comparison it would pay about 50 to 55 cents for CNG, he said.
“With a fleet as large as the city of Tulsa’s, the savings really would be significant,” Bartlett said.
The fuel budget for next fiscal year is expected to be increased by $1.1 million over the $4.5 million that was budgeted for this year because of climbing gas prices, the mayor said.
Equipment Management Director Brent Jones, who oversees the fleet, told the Tulsa World that even though the city doesn’t pay the retail price at the pump, its costs are going up, as well.
The city pays an average of $2 per gallon now and is budgeting for $2.50 per gallon for next fiscal year, he said.
Bartlett, an oilman, said it’s difficult to forecast gas and diesel costs because of uncontrollable factors, such as unrest in other parts of the world.
“We’ve all seen what the prices have done in just the past couple of months,” he said. “It’s up to the roof. If the unrest that we’ve seen in north Africa spreads to Saudi Arabia, all bets are off.”
But natural gas, he noted, is plentiful in the United States.
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