DETROIT -- 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.
Today, vehicles with engines retrofitted by Roush to run on propane deliver water for Nestle Waters North America and carry students to school throughout Michigan as well as in states as far away as Florida and Texas.
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.
"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 school buses fueled by propane into its fleet in December.
"School buses operating on propane are environmentally friendly and reliable in cold weather conditions, plus offer cost-saving benefits," said Keith Wunderlich, superintendent of Waterford schools.
In November, KIPP Jacksonville Schools in Florida deployed a fleet of 14 Blue Bird Vision Propane buses equipped with Roush's propane fuel systems.
"We ... were impressed by the safe and clean-operating properties of propane-fueled buses," said Bobby Kennedy, founding transportation manager of KIPP Jacksonville Schools.
Roush CleanTech is part of the Roush Enterprises holding company, which also includes Roush Industries, Roush Performance and Roush Fenway Racing.
"Obviously, clients like Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are near and dear to our heart, but if we are not around and are not diverse enough to weather the downturns that are going to come, we are not going to be any good to those customers," Mouw said.
Roush began exploring a number of alternatives for buses and vans 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 United States, there is a plentiful supply of propane, which is a derivative of natural gas. On a vehicle, compressed-natural-gas tanks must be larger and thicker than a propane tank because compressed natural gas 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 United States], 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 United States, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That compares with about 153,000 vehicles powered by compressed natural gas that are on the road in America, according to Natural Gas for America.
SundayMonday Business on 01/16/2017