Natural gas.
In fact, it’s being done now.
It way, way, way, way, way, way cheaper than petroleum, and burns clean too!
If you want to see the future, look at Interstate Commerce.
And, here’s another good side to natural gas as a fuel – because it burns cleaner, the engines last exceedingly longer! So now, your 100,000+ mile vehicle becomes a 200,000+ mile vehicle!
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Shale Gas Set to Reshape Trucking
By REBECCA SMITH
Updated May 23, 2012, 4:23 p.m. ET
Rising diesel costs, last year, forced Waste Management Inc. WM +0.91% to charge customers an extra $169 million, just to keep its garbage trucks fueled. This year, the nation’s biggest trash hauler has a new defensive strategy: it is buying trucks that will run on cheaper natural gas.
In fact, the company says 80% of the trucks it purchases during the next five years will be fueled by natural gas. Though the vehicles cost about $30,000 more than conventional diesel models, each will save $27,000-a-year or more in fuel, says Eric Woods, head of fleet logistics for Waste Management. By 2017, the company expects to burn more natural gas than diesel.

Darrold Withrow, 41, is a certified fueler and mechanic at Waste Management, and he fills up a truck with liquefied natural gas in Oakland, California. / Photograph by Alison Yin for The Wall Street Journal
“The economics favoring natural gas are overwhelming,” says Scott Perry, vice president of procurement at Ryder Systems Inc., R +2.31% one of the nation’s largest truck-leasing companies and a transporter of goods for the grocery, automotive, electronics and retail industries.
The shale gas revolution, which cut the price of natural gas to about $2.70 a million British Thermal Units in the past year, already has shaken up the utility industry, which is switching to natural gas from coal in a big way. Vast Amounts of natural gas in shale rock formations have been unlocked by improved drilling techniques, making the fuel cheap and plentiful across the U.S.
Now the shale-gas boom is rippling through transportation. Never before has Read the rest of this entry »