AT&T – which operates thousands of Ford and General Motors vehicles converted to run on compressed natural gas – is typical of the customers who have turned to the fuel to power their fleets. The vans are large enough to accommodate bulky gas canisters hidden beneath the floor.
They cover enough miles for the low cost of natural gas to justify CNG-powered vehicles' higher purchase costs. The depots also host CNG fuelling stations, freeing the vans from reliance on the sparse network of public fuelling sites.
The question is whether the technology can, in contrast to other alternatives to traditional petrol and diesel, establish itself as economically viable.
That is likely to present a significant challenge, says John O'Dell, green-car editor of Edmunds.com, the car information site.
"The gasoline engine has been pretty much perfected," Mr O'Dell says. "It's a rough path to hope to try to replace it."
Yet CNG has better tools with which to tackle the path than many other alternatives. The glut of gas that has flooded the US market after the widespread adoption of new drilling techniques has sent the product's price plummeting. Manufacturers estimate the natural gas equivalent of a gallon of petrol costs about USD 1.25, against at least USD 3.40 for petrol in much of the US.
Just as importantly, gas prices are now so stable that suppliers are willing to sign fixed-price contracts for as long as a decade.
"The removal of volatility is really what is attracting customers," Jon Coleman, sustainability manager for fleet sales at Ford, says.
The natural gas can run in normal engines "hardened" to cope with it. Natural gas produces higher temperatures than liquid fuels and also provides less natural lubrication to engine parts.
Some Asian and European countries – Italy in particular – have long records of using CNG successfully to power some road vehicles, although with European gas prices now far higher than in the US, interest there is muted.
"[Hardened petrol engines] can well not have any base engine durability issues when converted to CNG," says Mark Maher, chief engineer for power train integration at General Motors.
Alongside the fuel savings, operators of CNG vehicles produce about 30 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally fuelled vehicles and rely on a domestic rather than imported product.
Those factors together make CNG's economics far more "straightforward" than those for pure electric cars, according to Mr Coleman.
"A fuel that reduces your carbon footprint, reduces your dependence on foreign oil and reduces your costs becomes very, very attractive," Mr Coleman says.
Nevertheless, a glance at Chrysler's Ram 2500 CNG-equipped pick-up truck illustrates one big challenge. Even stored at 3,600 pounds per square inch, the gas takes up five times the space of a similar-range petrol tank. Gas cylinders fill nearly half the truck's cargo-carrying rear bed.
The canisters' size favours large commercial vehicles, according to Paul Nahra, a senior technical specialist for BorgWarner, a supplier of power train components.
"They have the size to accommodate these large tanks," he says.
Heavy commercial users also tend to record the mileages necessary to pay for CNG equipment. Conversion costs about USD 6,000 for a Ford F150, according to Mr Coleman, and operating costs are about 10 cents a mile cheaper.
"You need to run 60,000 miles on natural gas to recover the investment," Mr Coleman says. "We have customer fleets where vehicles do that in two years or less."
Most significantly, the shortage of CNG filling stations in much of the US means that operators are wary of running vehicles that follow unpredictable routes or stray long distances from home depots on CNG.
There are slightly more than 400 public CNG stations in the whole US, against 850 in Italy.
"If CNG were readily available without constraint, I think that that would have a big positive influence on demand," Mr Maher says.
Even though CNG vehicle demand is rising fast, overall numbers remain small. Ford expects to sell 15,000 CNG-ready vehicles this year, Mr Coleman says. The figure is five times the number sold in 2010 – but only a tiny fraction of the 2.4m vehicles the company will sell this year in the US.
The numbers are, nevertheless, growing fast. Mr Nahra and many other observers expect the technology to account for 10 per cent of US commercial vehicle sales by the end of this decade.
"The attraction is for those that can really take advantage of the cost savings," Mr Nahra says.
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