In 1988, I had the great honor and pleasure to serve the
IANGV as its second President. Following on the tenure of its
initial President, Bob Cumming, who served the organization well by
getting it established, we now had to set about building the
organization.
Today, we would call that marketing, branding and public relations –
but in those days we simply wanted to get the word out, let people know
that we existed, what our purpose was, and why they should support
us. We needed to establish credibility and convince people that
development of the global market NGV market was important and that we
were the right organization to spear-head this world-wide effort.
We began by establishing information exchanges and setting up an annual
meeting of the IANGV Council and a bi-ennial international
conference. The first international conference was in Sydney,
Australia in 1988 and that was a big boost in putting us “on the
map”. By 1990 and the second IANGV international Conference in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, we had significantly increased attendance at
the conference and industry recognition.
Growth in our organization ranks was a high priority as well as global
representation. By 1990 we had successfully increased our
membership sales by 40% to 142 members world-wide and increased our
country representation by 15% to 27 countries world-wide
participating. We had achieved a critical point by now having a
strong enclave of members and world-wide representation that we could
advance the course of supporting the global NGV market.
One of our big challenges was to pursue the involvement of Original
Equipment Manufacturers (OEM’s) so that NGV’s could be assembly-line
produced and carry a manufacturer’s warranty. At that time NGV’s
were principally built with “conversion kits” that took a gasoline or
diesel-powered engine and converted it to CNG with a modification
kit. As a result, the vehicle didn’t operate with maximum
efficiency since the engine was designed to run on another fuel but was
“adapted” to CNG. OEM’s eventually got on board but it took a
while and a lot of convincing. Another challenge was developing
engineering standards to be used for CNG equipment and components so
they would operate safely and efficiently. Once of the first
candidates was storage cylinders, which we began in 1990 and finally
achieved our 150 standard 10 years later.
So looking back, this period was part of the early formative years of
the IANGV. Based on dedicated, committed and enthusiastic support
of a strong Executive Council from all over the world, together with a
strong Secretary General – Garth Harris, we took the IANGV to the next
level of establishing itself as a top-notch professional world-wide
energy organization.
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