USA, California
A US District Court Judge has ruled that the Department of Energy (DOE) hasn’t met its obligations under the 1992 EPAct in relation to programs aimed at displacing light duty vehicle gasoline use with alternative fuels by 10% by 2000 and 30% by 2010. Rich Kolodziej, President of NGVAmerica, says the result could prove to be a win-win situation for the natural gas vehicle industry.
The ruling arose from a lawsuit taken against the DOE for failing to impose mandates on private and local fleets that would have helped to achieve the replacement goals. The judge however, found that the violation wasn’t that mandates weren’t imposed, which could be done at the discretion of the DOE, but that the DOE hadn’t established “goals that are achievable” when it determined that the 2000 and 2010 targets couldn’t be achieved. If revised targets had been set, the DOE was then required to determine by January 1 2000 whether private and local fleet mandates were necessary or not. The ruling requires the DOE to set aside its determination, made in January 2004, that private fleet mandates are not required, and to take immediate action to comply with the requirements of the Act. New targets are now required to be set by March 27.
While the ruling may be contested by the DOE, the likely outcome is that at some point programs will be put in place to achieve realistic targets. Kolodziej says that while these programs may or may not include private fleet mandates, they will need to be more aggressive than current programs in order to match political and community expectations, “The establishment of a meaningful replacement fuels goal could prove helpful to the NGV industry, and NGVAmerica will be doing what we can to encourage this.”
Though hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are the subject of much government funded research, they are not a realistic prospect for fuel replacement by 2010, thus leaving natural gas and other viable alternatives as the likely candidates under a newly devised program.
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