"More has happened in the last eight months (to promote CNG use) than happened in the previous eight years," contends Myles Meehan, Philadelphia Electric's manager of gas business.
Meehan, it turns out, isn't just blowing CNG smoke.
Petroleum companies, eager to find new markets for their large supplies of natural gas, are taking steps to combat CNG's biggest drawback: Lack of availability.
In California, Colorado and Washington, Amoco, Unocal and Phillips Petroleum have installed CNG dispensers alongside their regular gas pumps to refuel vehicles equipped with conversion kits that allow them to burn either CNG or gasoline.
These CNG dispensers are scheduled to be installed by several other petroleum companies in some of their Pennsylvania stations later this year, Meehan says.
In other developments:
* A Canadian company, FuelMaker Corp., is planning to market a residential natural gas compressor/dispenser in the United States in about a year. The dispenser, already being tested by a number of U.S. utilities, will allow homeowners with natural gas service to refuel their own cars.
* The new clean-air legislation requires companies in polluted big cities such as Philadelphia to begin converting their service fleets to alternative
fuels by the 1998 model year. That will encourage CNG use for two reasons: CNG could mean important cost savings for service fleets. And CNG is ideal for a fleet that returns at the end of each day to a lot where it can be refueled.
* CNG also stands to benefit from a recent program in which the State of Pennsylvania will pay part of the cost of converting fleet vehicles to an alternative fuel.
* The automakers are finally getting into the CNG act. General Motors is building several thousand CNG-powered pickups, primarily for use in pollution- plagued California, and Chrysler has announced a pilot project to build about 50 CNG vehicles.
