President Obama on Wednesday announced a $1 billion National Community Deployment Challenge to spur deployment of natural gas, electric and other alternative fuel vehicles in communities around the country.

The swing toward natural gas vehicles was taking on aspects of a bandwagon. The president’s pitch came the same week that two U.S. major automakers paraded out their new natural gas-powered pickup trucks, and GE and Chesapeake Energy heralded a new “CNG In A Box” fueling station (see separate reports).

“At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how much natural gas or flexfuel or electric vehicles you have, if there’s no place to charge them up or fill them up,” Obama said at the Daimler Trucks North America Mt. Holly Truck Manufacturing Plant in Mount Holly, NC. “So that’s why I’m announcing today a program that will put our communities on the cutting edge of what clean energy can do. To cities and towns all across the country, what we’re going to say is ‘if you make a commitment to buy more advanced vehicles for your community, whether they run on electricity or biofuels or natural gas, we’ll help you cut through the red tape and build fueling stations nearby.'”

The program will help 10-15 communities to invest in the necessary infrastructure, remove regulatory barriers and create local incentives to support deployment of alternative fuel vehicles “at critical mass,” according to the White House. The proposal would be “fuel neutral,” allowing communities to determine if electrification, natural gas or other alternative fuels would be the best fit. “Deployment communities would serve as real-world laboratories, leveraging limited federal resources to develop different models to deploy advanced vehicles at scale,” the White House said. The program would also support the development of up to five regional liquefied natural gas corridors where alternative fuel trucks could transport goods without using oil.

The president is also proposing a new tax incentive for commercial trucks that provides a credit for 50% of the incremental cost of a dedicated alternative-fuel truck, including trucks powered by natural gas or electricity, for a five-year period.

The program includes incentives to help consumers and businesses purchase new, advanced cars and trucks, including increasing and expanding the current tax credit for advanced vehicles to $10,000 from the current $7,500, while allowing the credit to be applied to additional types of technologies not currently covered. And the president announced a research challenge that would invest in breakthrough technologies to make electric vehicles as affordable and convenient to operate as gasoline-powered vehicles by the end of the decade.

As he has done repeatedly since his State of the Union speech in January, Obama once again said the country must pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy (see Daily GPI, Jan. 27; Jan. 26). His comments on Wednesday were focused on gasoline prices and the administration’s efforts to reduce reliance on foreign oil.

The Mt. Holly plant last year built its 1,000th natural gas truck (see Daily GPI, Nov. 10, 2011). “The Freightliner trucks that you’re making here at this plant run on natural gas and that makes them quieter, it makes them better for the environment, it makes them cheaper to fill up than they would be with diesel,” Obama told workers at the plant.

Obama once again called for an end to $4 billion in federal subsidies for the oil and gas industry (see Daily GPI, March 5). “The American people have subsidized the oil industry long enough,” he said. “They don’t need the subsidies. It’s time to end that taxpayer giveaway to an industry that’s never been more profitable and invest in clean energy, which has never been more promising.”

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) said its members were disappointed to hear Obama continue his push for “punitive tax increases” on the oil and gas industry. “The increased costs actually would make a bad situation worse by discouraging oil and gas investments in the United States, increasing energy costs and making us less competitive and threatening job creation and the broader economy,” said NAM’s Dorothy Coleman, vice president of Tax and Domestic Economic Policy.

Chrysler Group LLC this week said it plans to become North America’s only auto manufacturer to offer a factory-built compressed natural gas (CNG) pickup truck (see related story). Chrysler said its Ram 2500 heavy duty CNG pickup is aimed at fleet and commercial customers, and will be on the market in July. Also this week General Motors and its Chevrolet and GMC units rolled out a new bifuel CNG line of 2013 pickup trucks offering a 650-mile range that is particularly aimed a commercial fleet operators (see Daily GPI, March 6). GM said it will be taking orders beginning in April and initial models will be on the road by the end of this year.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. and GE on Wednesday unveiled a new “CNG In A Box” natural gas fueling system, which they said could lower fleet vehicle fueling costs by 40% and emissions by 24%, as part of their collaboration to develop infrastructure solutions to speed up the adoption of natural gas as a transportation fuel (see related story).

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