Seal Beach, CA-based Clean Energy Fuels Corp. said Tuesday it plans to build LNG refueling stations throughout the region following the main trucking corridors between Los Angeles, San Diego and the points to the east in the Inland Empire of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. A backbone of hub LNG stations is envisioned, the company said.

Last summer Clean Energy opened what it hailed as the world’s largest LNG/compressed natural gas (CNG) truck fueling station in the nation’s busiest port, the combined Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors in Southern California. The new port fueling facility, which is open to the general public, supplies the fueling needs of several hundred port trucks daily, according to Clean Energy. The firm is an offshoot of a company founded by oilman T. Boone Pickens, who serves on Clean Energy’s board of directors.

Now the company is proposing to build new or upgrade existing fueling stations at “strategic points” along truck transport routes in nine cities: Los Angeles, Commerce, Industry, Fontana, Riverside, Tulare, Barstow, Otay Mesa and San Diego.

Clean Energy CEO Andrew Littlefair said beefed-up LNG truck fueling points will help create a “full-scale Southwest LNG truck fueling corridor” that covers all of California and parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Adjacent to the Los Angeles-Long Beach ports, Clean Energy operates the LNG truck fueling station on 2.7 acres. It is the second one the company opened in the area to serve natural gas-powered port drayage trucks. The first station, operating since late 2007, is in nearby Carson, CA.

The port fueling facilities were designed in cooperation with a port clean air action plan and truck fleet operators in their efforts to retire or convert all of the old diesel trucks entering the ports regularly, Littlefair said.

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