Toronto Buses to get Suncor Biodiesel, and More...
by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada 
on 05.14.06
The 1,491 buses of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) will start running on a blend of diesel and soy-based biodiesel provided by Suncor Energy. Unfortunately, the ratio of the blend is not clear at this time, but the contract extends over the next 20 months and 120 million liters (32 million US gallons) of biodiesel will be provided. It's hard to know if that's a significant amount without knowing how much fossil-diesel the TTC buses use, but some is better than none, and the door is now open for more. This is not Suncor's only "non-fossil" project: They also plan to open Canada's largest ethanol production facility in St. Clair Township, Ontario (lets hope this will be cellulosic ethanol like Ottawa-based Iogen) and a 76 megawatt wind project (which they say should be enough to power 22,000 homes) in Ripley, Ontario. ::Suncor's Press Release, via ::AutoblogGreen
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It's hard to know if that's a significant amount without knowing how much fossil-diesel the TTC buses use
TTC buses logged 64 million miles in 2005.
http://www.toronto.ca/ttc/pdf/operatingstatistics2005.pdf
Average MPG of transit buses is about 3.5 MPG.
http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb24/Edition24_Chapter05.pdf
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html
That means TTC buses used a little over 18 million gallons of fuel in 2005.
32 million gallons over 20 months is about 19 million gallons per year.
Looks as if they'll be using it as their sole fuel source.
That certainly would be great, though if true, it's weird that they didn't mention it in the press release and instead talk about about "blending" and such.
Cincinnati has also started using soy based diesel. They signed a long term contract for $3 a gallon and get a $1 a gallon rebate from the IRS. At the beginning of the year they were using a 30/70 mix with the lower ratio bio, since the price of diesel has gone up they have moved to a 50/50 ratio. The Metro bus fleet uses 10,000 of fuel a day.
One positive for people downtown who don't ride the bus, I've noticed that they don't leave a trail of black smoke and noxious odors.