CNG stations in California

Why California has a quarter of the country's public CNG

Three things stacked up here that did not stack up anywhere else. The South Coast air district and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach pushed refuse fleets, transit agencies and drayage trucks onto natural gas from the late 1990s on. The state's two big gas utilities, SoCalGas and PG&E, built public stations at their own service yards and opened them to anyone with a card. And the Low Carbon Fuel Standard made renewable natural gas worth enough that Clean Energy, the largest operator in the state, could build truck stations along the freight lanes and sell RNG through nearly all of them.

The result is a network with three distinct kinds of station. The Clean Energy and Chevron sites are truck stations: high-flow dispensers, wide lots, 24 hours, fleet cards. The utility sites are smaller and older, often 3,600 psi but sometimes tucked behind a service-center gate with a card reader. And a long list of cities, school districts and transit agencies sell fuel to the public from what is really a fleet yard, which is why a station can be listed as public and still have a name like "Whittier Union High School District." The badges on each listing tell you which kind you are looking at.

Geographically the stations follow the trucks: the Los Angeles basin and Inland Empire, the I-5 and Highway 99 spine of the Central Valley from Bakersfield to Stockton, the Bay Area, and San Diego. North of Sacramento the network thins fast, and the I-5 corridor page shows how long the run to Oregon is without a fill.