AT&T said Wednesday it would spend more than $500 million over the next decade to start moving its vehicle fleet to natural-gas vehicles, hybrids, and other alternatives to regular gasoline-powered cars and trucks, the WSJ reports. That includes $350 million for 8,000 compressed-gas vehicles, and $215 million for 7,000 other "alternative fuel" vehicles.
That's the biggest corporate commitment to gas-fired vehicles, AT&T says, and will save the company about 50 million gallons of gasoline over the next decade. That savings alone, worth about $100 million at current prices, clearly won't pay for the plan.
But the move will let AT&T crow about advances on three fronts which are in vogue these days: helping reduce dependence on foreign oil, helping the environment, and even helping American manufacturing. Oh wait, Mr. Pickens is doing the crowing himself, calling AT&T's plan a "demonstration of real American corporate leadership that will be good for their bottom line, the environment and the country."
The company says Ford will build the the natural-gas vehicle chassis and the plan will "save or create" 5,000 jobs over the next five years.
Adding 8,000 natural-gas vehicles is a drop in the bucket for the overall U.S. transport pool, but it's a big number for the nascent compressed natural gas vehicle market, which the U.S. Natural Gas Vehicle Association says numbers about 120,000 in the U.S. That's more than in Bolvia, which has about 90,000 natural gas vehicles, but a wee bit behind Brazil and Argentina, which each have about 1.5 million.