This fuel can save the planet. Why won’t the city use it?

Robert B. Catell

To the editor:

“Can Sanitation go green?” thoroughly explains why renewable natural gas made from organic waste is the best fuel to replace diesel for New York’s truck and bus fleets. RNG is the cleanest, lowest-carbon fuel available. In fact, as a fuel, it’s net carbon-negative over its life cycle. It would slash greenhouse gases and health-damaging emissions from refuse trucks. That’s why the Department of Sanitation should adopt it.

The piece was well researched and balanced, airing both sides. But one detractor’s statement that “negative emissions is a policy construct” because methane captured from landfills and burned in a vehicle “comes out of that tailpipe as CO₂” is misleading. The total cradle-to-grave impact of making and using a fuel is what matters to the climate. If you compare the emissions avoided by capturing methane from a landfill to make RNG versus the CO₂ tailpipe emissions from burning it in vehicles, it amounts to a 70% decrease in greenhouse gases over the life cycle of the fuel. If food waste or manure is used as the feedstock and processed in a digester, the decrease can be 300%.

That’s no policy construct; it’s a real-world impact verified by Argonne National Labs and the California Air Resources Board. It’s the most powerful way to make tangible, rapid progress toward climate goals in the heavy-transport sector.

Skeptics may be forgiven for thinking a 300% reduction in greenhouse gases is too good to be true. But it really is true and deserves wider recognition, including from electric-vehicle advocates. They argue that electric trucks are a greener choice, even taking into account emissions from fossil-fuel-fired plants that generate the electricity they use. But that’s not the case. Life-cycle emissions of electric vehicles vary depending on the energy mix used to charge the batteries, but they are not zero and certainly not negative.

In California, the Air Resources Board found life- cycle emissions from electric vehicles were 70% lower than from gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles—certainly an improvement, but not close to 300%.

Testing next-generation heavy-duty electric trucks makes sense, but they are far from service-ready. You can count on one hand the all-electric refuse trucks in operation. They lack the torque needed to plow snow (as Sanitation’s trucks must do) and have never even been tried for that purpose. On the other hand, near-zero-emission natural-gas engines and renewable natural gas have a track record of high-torque performance with high reliability and cost-efficiency, and are widely deployed in municipal fleets today—just not in New York City. Given their public health and climate benefits, it’s time to change that.

Robert B. Catell

Chairman of the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center

Stony Brook University

Read this Letter to the Editor or download it HERE.

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