Introducing Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) to the public is a chicken and egg problem. If it were up to you to switch the nation’s vehicles over to natural gas, would you build the vehicles first, or the stations? Without stations, the vehicles aren’t going anywhere; there is demand but no supply. But if there are CNG stations without people driving CNG vehicles, the stations will sit unused – supply without demand.
This winter, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, in partnership with OnCue Express, Love’s and Hutchinson Oil, is opening 11 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) stations in cities across Oklahoma. While the stations are primarily used to fuel fleet vehicles, they are open to the public as well, currently pumping at $1.39 per gas gallon equivalent.
This is a huge step for the natural gas vehicle industry in Oklahoma. Chesapeake is aiming to eradicate the supply and demand problem. The stations, strewn across Oklahoma from Elk City to Oklahoma City to Arkoma, will primarily be used by their own fleets, eliminating the problem of demand and ensuring the stations won’t lose money.
But Chesapeake is also opening the stations to the public, with the goal of saturating the market enough so that people will see it’s possible to drive across their entire state with a CNG vehicle and not run out of places to fill up. With this incentive, Chesapeake is breaking the chicken/egg cycle and making it possible for all of us to experience and use CNG in our everyday lives.
And with CNG pumping at $1.39 per gas gallon equivalent when gas is already over $3.00 a gallon, that’s just one more reason to go blue. Clean, Affordable, Abundant, American, CNG Blue.
Check out the video of a couple of the opening events and each station’s “first fill” below.
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