The City of Hamilton, Ohio, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its first compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling station on April 4. The publicly accessible fast-fill station will have two dispensers with two hoses each and will be expandable to double that should demand grow.

The city currently has four CNG vehicles that can fuel there, and it has letters of intent from the Hamilton City School District and the Butler County Regional Transit Authority to fuel at the facility, Mark Murray, project manager for Underground Utilities, told Government Fleet.

"As far as we know, this will be the first publicly accessible [CNG fueling] station in southwestern Ohio," he said.

The project is estimated to cost $1.7 million, and the city received a $700,000 grant through the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program administered by the Ohio Department of Transportation.

The city has a fleet of about 300 vehicles, and the four CNG vehicles it already has currently fuel at a small time-fill station. The Underground Utilities department uses the CNG Ford Fusion, two Ford Transit Connect vans, and a Ford F-150, purchased with grant funding in 2011. Murray said the department has been happy with the CNG vehicles, and the city is continually evaluating expanding its CNG fleet.

"All our vehicles are evaluated when a request comes through to determine if the economics work to put them on CNG," he said.

By Thi Dao