Long Beach rolls out bio-diesel fleet

The city of Long Beach stepped up its efforts to reduce the amount of smog in the air last week by launching the preliminary stage of using bio-diesel blends for a portion of its vehicle fleet.
Mayor Bob Foster and First District Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal, who helped spearhead the program, both announced the plan last Tuesday aboard one of the city’s John Deere tractors that replenishes sand daily by raking the beach.
For a city flagged for having poor air quality over the years, ten total vehicles, including all of the city’s tractors and skip loaders and a portion of bulldozers and dump trucks, will now be fueled with B20, which is made of 20 percent vegetable oil and 80 percent petroleum diesel.
The blend is most common for cities now using cleaner alternative fuels such as Santa Monica, which has used the blend for its vehicles for years, city officials said.
Larry Rich, sustainability coordinator of the Sustainable City Commission, said using bio-diesel will reduce particulate emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and smoke particulates.
Air quality has long been a problem in Los Angeles County because of port trucks and container ships that inundate the harbor and freeways.
“Using just the B20 reduces the amount we see,” Rich said. “That is a positive reduction, at very little cost differential not having to mechanically upgrade.”
Rich said the first step is to see if there are any problems with using the bio-diesel blend and then possibly using the fuel for all of its 250 addition diesel vehicles.
"The City of Long Beach is launching this bio-diesel program as part of our ongoing commitment to environmental sustainability. We are proud of our environmental record, and we are always looking for ways to expand it," Foster said before pumping bio-diesel fuel into a tractor and taking it for a demonstration spin up and down the Belmont Shore area.
Bio-diesel is a cleaner-burning alternative to petroleum diesel, and testing shows that bio-diesel poses significantly less of a risk to human health than petroleum diesel.
"The City of Long Beach was looking for better sources of fuel to improve the area’s air quality and health. Using bio-diesel is also the City’s way of taking the next step toward using more renewable resources," said Lowenthal. "It’s only been a short time since I brought the agenda item forward that initiated this bio-diesel project. I am eager for the results as a validation of its worth in terms of improving the air and, thus, the health of our community."
In using B20, it is more cost effective because there is no engine conversion needed and the vehicles can switch back and forth with either diesel or bio-diesel. He said using B100, or pure vegetable oil, would mean all of the vehicles’ engines would have to be converted.
If everything goes well, in the next few years, the next step commonly considered is using B50, a 50/50 blend.
Rich said the supplier of the city’s first batch of bio-diesel is Merrimack Energy Group, a broker of all fuels, and gets its bio-diesel mainly made from soy beans from US domestic sources from the Midwest and possibly Canada.
“As we go through this pilot program, we may be using bio-diesel from different sources,” he said.
The city council requested in January to start using the alternative fuel and city officials spent seven months trying to get a parameter, figuring out a way to use bio-diesel in one location.
The Port of Long Beach, however, is going a different route requiring new equipment, newer modern engines to clean up the fuel conditions. While the state is planning on regulating the type of trucks and the engines, to slowly be replaced with Liquid Natural Gas. The city will still have some diesel engines that can use bio-diesel at a cheaper cost.
The city is also increasing use of Compressed Natural Gas, propane, electrical and hybrids.