Last June Farnsworth, 55, created a mini-filling station at his house between Wasilla and Palmer and ordered a 2009 Honda Civic GX.
By the time the car arrived on Dec. 31, prices at the pump had dropped. But Farnsworth said he's still paying about a dollar less to fuel his car than other cars on the road. Now he's a man on a mission to encourage others to get on the natural gas bandwagon.
Farnsworth said his green car, emblazoned with "CNG" stickers and a "NTRLGS" license plate, cost about $6,000 more than a normal Civic. He was reluctant to reveal the cost of the compressor unit hooked up to his natural gas line, but said the extra cost was offset by a $4,000 federal tax credit for the car and a $1,000 credit for the compressor. He estimated he pays 4.7 cents per mile for fuel. According to AAA, the average small-sedan owner pays 9.4 cents per mile.
Replacing foreign oil with natural gas as a transportation fuel is a cornerstone of wealthy financier T. Boone Pickens' "Pickens Plan," an oil-alternative energy policy proposal the businessman has been promoting with a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign since July.
Businesses are jumping on board as well. North American garbage collector Waste Management Inc. announced last month it will invest $29 million to add 106 compressed-natural gas trucks for its Seattle operations this year and $7.5 million to build a fueling station that will also be open to the public.
Last week Farnsworth talked about his Civic, which he says is "greener" than a Toyota Prius. He even let us fuel it up at his home filling station. He said he's happy to answer questions about his rare ride, one of only 2,000 being built by Honda this year. Reach him at farnsak@alaska.com.
Q. What do you do?
A. I work at the railroad. I drive every day from here to the Alaska Railroad building on First (Avenue). It's 41 miles, chair to chair, one way.
Q. What do you do there?
A. I'm director of facilities. I manage all of their buildings from Seward to Fairbanks.
Q. Do you use (the car) exclusively for commuting? Could you take it for a road trip to Fairbanks?
A. Can't do it. That's one of the challenges for natural gas. You can't even fill up in the Valley here with it. This car has about a 250-mile range. I can't go to Seward, can't go to Fairbanks. Yet. We get natural gas (refueling stations) in those places and I can.
So it's a commuter, I take it to soccer -- my daily runabout. If I want to go someplace I've actually got to take the truck or the Subaru. Most of my miles are commuting, though.
Q. Do you save money driving this car?
A. I will over time. When I did the ROI (return on investment) initially, at $4.50 a gallon (for gasoline) as opposed to a buck and a half a gallon (equivalent). I'm going to pay for here, the ROI was about 13 months. Now that fuel is down to this level, if it stays here, it's probably three years before I'm even. But if the price of fuel goes up ... I'm betting that in the 200,000 miles I'm going to drive this car, I'm going to make a profit on it.
Q. You mentioned you're familiar with natural gas cars and filling stations and whatnot. Tell me again how?
A. Twelve years ago or so, (gas station company) Mapco, as part of a fueling deal with the Municipality of Anchorage, built a compressed natural gas filling station out there on Tudor and Wright. It was a financial disaster. We didn't have any customers, the city had their own pumps, things like that. So they closed it down and moved the equipment out. Now the only place you can actually get natural gas besides at the two city pumps is at Ditch Witch in Anchorage.
We were betting at Mapco that people would see the value of this (natural gas-fueled cars), and we would see big infrastructure installed and people would buy cars and -- you know, mom, apple pie and the American way. It never happened.
So when the price of fuel started going bonkers again, I revisited the technology.
That's how I discovered that, other than Alaska, anyplace that has natural gas has quite a few of these (cars). And the key to it is that in the places where this has worked, the cities have opened up their pumps.
California, Arizona, Utah, all of these places, if they opened up their pumps so people would buy the cars, then once there got to be some cars on the road, then Clean Energy (Fuels) and (natural gas fuel promoter T. Boone) Pickens and those groups would start building CNG stations out there. So it's kind of the chicken and egg, which one comes first.
Q. Why invest in a natural gas car when future stores of natural gas are not guaranteed?
A. What's happening with the crude oil in the pipeline? Is that a better alternative? Our production is down to 40 percent of what it used to be. ... You know, we've got natural gas all over the place. They're drilling for natural gas up here at the corner of Trunk Road. Natural gas reserves are all over.
Are we running out of it around here? Well judging by the price, yeah. But we're still shipping it out to Japan as LNG aren't we? To me there's a lot more potential for discovery and exploration and development in natural gas than there is in oil. Plus natural gas has a cleaner footprint -- it's less polluting.
Q. You're trusting that in the future this is going to be readily available even though now things might look shaky?
A. Do I ever think natural gas is going to surpass gasoline? No. Do I think we can make a significant dent -- would it be a, as T. Boone calls it, a bridge between fossil fuel and whatever we're using in the future? I think it is.
Find Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.
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