Roush builds market for propane-powered vehicles

Tucked away in an industrial part of suburban Detroit is Roush CleanTech, a division of Roush Enterprises that has been making propane buses, vans, and heavy-duty pickups since 2010.

It took Roush CleanTech a grueling six years to surpass total sales of 14,000 propane-powered trucks and buses sold. But business is picking up. The company says it's on track to sell 6,000 more vehicles over the next year and expects to pass the 20,000 mark by the end of 2017.

It helps that all three major school bus manufacturers - Blue Bird, IC Bus, and Thomas Built Buses - offer propane-powered buses as an option to school districts, said Todd Mouw, vice president of sales and marketing for Roush CleanTech.

"That helps to legitimize the technology with the school districts," Mouw said. "Instead of taking a year and a half to make a sale, it's taking months."

The idea to jump into the field of vehicles powered by alternative fuels came from Jack Roush, chairman of Roush Enterprises, and the company's top management team at a time when the company wanted to diversify its businesses beyond its core expertise of contract engineering, racing, and automotive performance parts.

Roush formed a partnership with Ford for a 6.8-liter V-10 gasoline engine that it converts into an engine that can run on propane by installing up to 170 of its own components. Roush also landed a partnership with Blue Bird and ships the engines to the bus manufacturer's plant in Fort Valley, Ga.

Waterford School District in suburban Detroit introduced 10 new school buses fueled by propane into its fleet last month.

"School buses operating on propane are environmentally friendly and reliable in cold weather conditions, plus offer cost-saving benefits," Keith Wunderlich, superintendent of Waterford schools, said in a statement.

Roush began exploring a number of alternative fuels for bus and van transportation in 2008 in response to escalating gas and diesel prices. After an extensive review of possible fuels, the company concluded propane was a better choice than compressed natural gas even though such gas, often called CNG, has received a lot more media and industry attention.

In the U.S., there is a plentiful supply of propane, which is a derivative of natural gas. On a vehicle, CNG tanks must be larger and thicker than a propane tank because propane must be stored at a much higher pounds-per-square-inch measure, according to Natural Gas Vehicles for America.

Also, propane contains more than twice the usable energy content per cubic foot. Finally, it costs less to build propane autogas refueling stations and they use less electricity than CNG stations, Mouw said.

"It's cleaner than gasoline and diesel. We have a lot of it [in the U.S.], and we started to see that from a technical perspective it's easy to integrate into a Ford truck or a school bus," Mouw said.

There are more than 143,000 on-road propane vehicles in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy. That compares with about 153,000 vehicles powered by CNG that are on the road in America, according to Natural Gas for America.