Taxi company hails cleaner-burning cabs

Andrew Glazer

COSTA MESA -- A taxi company purchased 70 new natural gas-powered cars

from a local Ford dealer on Wednesday, making it one of the only fleets

in the country with exclusively “clean-fueled” cabs.

Rick Schorling, president of Santa Ana-based American Livery, Inc., said

the $3 million the company spent on the Crown Victorias -- almost $43,000

per cab -- will have economic and ecological benefits.

“I’m sure all of the taxi companies in the area will follow our lead,”

Schorling said.

He said the new cars, which burn compressed methane gas, can travel more

than 450,000 miles without serious maintenance problems.

Used police cars, which typically make up a taxi fleet, last much less

time and progressively spit out more toxic fumes, Schorling said. But the

exhaust from natural gas-powered cabs does not become dirtier as the cars

get older, said Terry Ryan, who sells natural gas-powered cars for Ford.

Martin Schlageter of the Sierra Club’s Los Angeles chapter, a

pro-environment nonprofit that does not readily support automobiles, said

the taxi company should be commended.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “These cars are definitely cleaner than what

most of us are driving around. They are improving air quality and that’s

what will make Orange County livable in the future.”

Much of the dark smog visible during the day in the Los Angeles basin

comes from automobile tailpipes, said Charles Zender, an earth

atmospheric physicist at UC Irvine.

He said exhaust from natural gas-powered cars would produce much less

smog. And he said carbon monoxide emissions from cars is the primary

cause of the unnatural warming of the earth’s atmosphere. Natural

gas-fueled cars would emit 20% less carbon than gasoline-fueled cars, he

said.

The only way natural gas cars could potentially create more pollution

than their gasoline-powered counterparts would be if methane was able to

escape from its storage canister, Zender said. Unburned methane gas has a

greater effect on global warming than carbon dioxide does.

“Just a 1% leak would more than counteract the benefits of natural gas,”

he said.

Taxi drivers have begun switching to natural gas-powered cabs in Mexico

City, where smog is bad enough some days to require schools to close.

Cabbies also drive natural gas cars in England, Belgium and Spain.

But one barrier preventing other taxi companies and family car owners in

the United States from switching to natural gas-powered autos is the lack

of fueling stations. Approximately 250 stations in California offer the

methane canisters while 5,000 have the traditional gasoline pumps, said

R.E. Price Jr. from the natural gas division of The Gas Co.

The Sierra Club’s Schlageter said it might take awhile before local

Exxon, Unocal and Arco stations begin offering alternative fuels.

“This is not a ‘Buck Rogers’ vision of the future,” Schlageter said. “But

people just need to get used to something new.”