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.
