Compressed Natural Gas and Liquefied Petroleum Gas as Alternative Fuels

The use of alternative fuels in the transportation industry has gained a strong support in recent years. In this paper an attempt was made to evaluate the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and compressed natural gas (NG) by 25 LPG‐bifuel and 14 NG‐bifuel vehicles that are operated by 33 transit systems throughout Nebraska. A set of performance measures such as average fuel efficiency in kilometers per liter, average fuel cost per kilometer, average oil consumption, and average operation and maintenance cost for alternatively fueled vehicles were calculated and compared with similar performance measures of gasoline powered vehicles. The results of the study showed that the average fuel efficiency of gasoline is greater than those of LPG and NG, and the average fuel costs (dollars per kilometer) for LPG and NG are smaller than those for gasoline for most of the vehicles under this study.