PalmerTrucksNews

BioCycle September 2011, Vol. 52, No. 9, p. 39

Fair Oaks Farms assembles team to roll out fleet of CNG engine-equipped trucks to deliver milk using natural gas that will eventually come from the dairy digester.

Nora Goldstein

FAIR Oaks Farms, based in Fair Oaks, Indiana, has embarked on a new venture — a compressed natural-gas (CNG)-powered milk fleet that will reduce the use of diesel fuel by more than 1.5 million gallons/ year. A portion of the natural gas to be used is renewable, tapping biogas from an anaerobic digester with capacity to process manure from 10,500 cows at the Fair Oaks Dairy. Two fueling stations are being installed — a northern station in Fair Oaks, and a southern station in Sellersburg, Indiana near the Kentucky border.

“Conditioned biogas from the digester will be transported via pipeline to the Fair Oaks fueling station where it will be pressurized and either used directly for fuel if trucks are there, or go into the natural gas pipeline,” says Mark Stoermann, the project manager. “The southern fueling station in Sellersburg will use exclusively natural gas, but what is taken out will be offset by what we put into the pipeline at the northern station.”

A new fleet of 42 milk-hauling trucks, equipped with Cummins Westport 8.9L natural gas engines, started being delivered to Fair Oaks last month. The CNG fleet will transport 53, 6,000 gallon loads of milk daily, equal to 7.5 million gallons per month or 90 million gallons of milk a year. The emissions and carbon footprint of CNG from the pipeline is over 40 percent less than that of diesel fuel — and that doesn’t account for the reduced carbon footprint of using renewable natural gas.

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