With support from the State of Louisiana and the Energy Department, Freedom Fuel officially opened its natural gas fueling station on Earth Day. The City of Shreveport is benefitting from the success of this project as it has stimulated local spending and generated jobs for the installation of the station, including production of storage spheres and compression equipment.
The facility was built by Trey and Jonathan Smith, part owners of Ivan Smith Furniture, which used $500,000 in funding from the Energy Department’s State Energy Program toward the project to help install necessary equipment for the Freedom Fuel station when it began last June.
Prior to this initiative, Ivan Smith Furniture gained experience in converting much of its fleet over to natural gas. In fact, the company built a private CNG station at its Shreveport Distribution Center to service many of its NGVs. The success of the project led to the new public station that is meant to provide additional fleet operations support for other nearby distribution centers, including Anheuser–Busch Budweiser and AT&T fleets.
Freedom Fuel is working with the Louisiana Clean Fuels Coalition to understand the total impact of both the public station project and the company’s fleet CNG conversion, including long-term energy savings. The project is one of many coordinated through the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which received $71 million in Recovery Act funding through SEP to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy to local governments, businesses and homeowners.
Source: Energy Department
