The post office operates the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world, with more than 210,000 vehicles traveling almost 1.3 billion miles a year.
The agency has a powerful reason to switch from expensive petroleum-derived fuels as rising fuel costs make a small but significant contribution to its mounting financial problems.
Its struggles to find cost-effective alternatives, however, highlight the obstacles to rolling out alternative vehicle technologies across the United States.
Rising Fuel Bills
In fiscal year 2011 (FY2011), the 12 months from October 2010 to September 2011, the postal service made a net loss of $5.1 billion. It would have been even worse if the agency had not deferred making retirement-linked payments to the U.S. Treasury.
Losses are being driven mostly by employment costs, including legislative requirements that mandate pre-funding of retiree health plans. Workers compensation, benefits and retirement funding account for 75 to 80 percent of total operating expenses, compared with under 10 percent for transportation and fuel. Nonetheless, the rising prices of gasoline and diesel contribute to the agency's woes.
In FY2011, a 25 percent increase in gasoline and diesel prices wiped out all the efficiency gains USPS made from better route planning, which cut the number of miles driven by 88 million or 5.4 percent. As a result, highway transportation costs rose $138 million or 4.3 percent to $3.343 billion.
Alternatives to Oil
The post office therefore has a sharp financial incentive to shift from using expensive petroleum-derived fuels to alternatives such as ethanol (E85), biodiesel, electric hybrids, or vehicles using gas-derived fuels such as compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG).
It also has a legal obligation to use more alternative fuel vehicles. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires that 75 percent of new vehicles acquired by federal fleets must run on alternative fuels. The mandate applies to fleets with 20 or more vehicles in metropolitan areas, capable of being centrally fuelled, with exceptions for some law enforcement, emergency and military vehicles.
Under the 2005 law, fleets must actually use alternative fuels in dual-fuel vehicles, unless they receive a waiver from the secretary of energy ("U.S. Postal Service: Fleet Alternative Fuel Vehicle Program Report for Fiscal Year 2011" Feb 2012).
The postal service is not technically covered by executive orders issued by President George W Bush in 2007 and President Barack Obama in 2009 requiring agencies to reduce their consumption of petroleum-derived fuels.
Nor is it subject to Obama's 2011 presidential memorandum requiring federal fleets to acquire only alternative fuel vehicles by the end of 2015. But the postal service has chosen to follow all these presidential directives as far as possible.
Alternatives Vehicles but no Fuel
USPS has a substantial number of alternative fuel vehicles. Out of a total stock of 212,000 vehicles in 2010, almost 44,000 (21 percent) were alternative fuel vehicles, according to the annual report of the Federal Fleet Policy Council. The largest number were flex-fuel vehicles capable of running on E85, which accounted for 39,000 vehicles.
The postal service has always been at the forefront of new transport technologies. USPS is also working with manufacturers to pioneer and test the latest generation of alternative vehicles and is currently testing vehicles made by E-Ride, Vantage, Navistar and Grumman.
The problem is not the vehicles, however, but availability of alternative fuels to use in them. In FY2011, USPS vehicles consumed just 782,000 gallons of alternative fuels (on a gasoline equivalent basis) out of a total of 155 million gallons, less than 1 percent. Most of the time, dual fuel vehicles have been filled with regular gasoline and diesel.
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