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AT&T goes green: Make Massive Natural Gas Vehicle Purchase

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:March 11, 2009

AT&T to spend $565 million on Ford hybrids, with Ford Motor Co. as the major beneficiary.

The telecommunications giant AT&T has agreed spend up to $565 million to replace more than 15,000 gas-powered vehicles over the next decade with a fleet powered by compressed natural gas or hybrid engines, with Ford Motor Co. as the major beneficiary.

The announcement is a boon for the movement to move American vehicles off traditional gasoline, a campaign that has been headlined by the Dallas energy investor T. Boone Pickens. AT&T said it would work with one of Pickens’s companies, Clean Energy Fuels, to provide refueling infrastructure.

“It’s obviously going to reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall L. Stephenson told the Economic Club of Washington on Wednesday. “My new neighbor, Boone Pickens, and I have talked a lot about that equation.”

Stephenson said the investment would “significantly lower” AT&T’s fuel costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. The Dallas-based company plans to move 8,000 heavy-duty vehicles to compressed natural gas and replace 7,100 passenger vehicles with hybrids over the next 10 years.

Tim Harden, Dallas-based AT&T’s president of supply chain management and fleet operations, said AT&T would initially focus the effort on a limited number of states, including California, Oklahoma and Texas, where there are more refueling stations.

“There are not a lot of fueling stations today,” Harden said. “We are going to have to develop those with the compressed natural gas companies so it’s readily available.”

Harden said AT&T would work with Clean Energy and Chesapeake Energy, two companies that spearheaded the campaign to get government incentives for fleet conversion.

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Tagged with: AT&T, Ford, Ford hybrids, Ford Motor Co., telecommunications

lindadamond

This is a good idea indeed and I would really like to see such initiative at other major car companies on the market. There should an united initiative to stop building cars that use oil a a propulsion method and start thinking green. There are ways to do it, but the oil companies are forcing the market to keep such polluting cars on the market.
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