T. Boone Pickens lost his bid for passage of Prop. 10, the ballot initiative that would have pumped $5 billion into alternative fuels. But that isn’t stopping the company he founded, Clean Energy Fuels Corp. in Seal Beach, from pumping thousands of gallons of liquid natural gas from their new $75 million manufacturing plant in the Mojave desert (photo courtesy of Clean Energy).

The new plant, near Boron, was fired up last week, and will take a couple of weeks to build up to its production capacity of 160,000 gallons per day, said Greg Roche, Clean Energy’s director of business development.

Once a third phase is built, in about a year, the plant will produce even more: a total of 240,000 gallons per day.

That makes it the largest plant of its kind in the southwest, Clean Energy officials say.

“We stepped forward as a company and said, ‘We’ll build the infrastructure to support those clean trucks,’” Roche said.

The plant is critical to the Clean Truck Program, an effort by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to replace up to 8,000 older, higher-polluting diesel trucks with cleaner-burning vehicles. A large number will be powered by liquid natural gas.

When the conversion is complete, in about four years, truck pollution at the ports will have been cut by an estimated 80 percent. It is part of a larger program that seeks to reduce all air pollution from the ports by 45 percent in the same time frame, said Port of Long Beach spokesman Art Wong. The program targets emissions from ships, trains and cargo handling equipment, among other types of machinery.

Natural gas is piped into the Boron plant, then is liquified by heavy compression. The fuel is used for heavy duty vehicles such as trucks and buses.

Compressed natural gas, which is not as heavily compressed as LNG, is more often used in passenger cars.

Clean Fuels is not only cranking up its liquid natural gas plant, but is also building a number of LNG refueling stations around the region.

Planning and construction of the plant has been underway for years, Roche said, and was not affected by the defeat of Prop. 10 at the polls. The ballot initiative would have helped consumers purchase alternative-fuel vehicles; Pickens, an oil billionaire and alternative energy advocate,  provided funding to the campaign to pass it.

Pickens is now a shareholder in the company he founded, Roche said. And the liquid natural gas plant helps advance his goals.

“It’s consistent with his message of trying to foster energy independence for America,” he said. “This is what it’s all about — a domestic source of clean fuel for trucks. This is his plan in action.”

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