It appears that we’re going to see more interest and maybe more products in the area of vehicles that use propane due to the engine fuels program work of the Propane Education & Research Council. The man in charge of this area is Brian Feehan. He’s pictured here to the right of a group that I was working with this morning (Mark Leitman, Stuart Flatow, Roy Willis and Brian).

Brian says that there’s discussion going on now in the area of using propane with tractors and combines. PERC hopes to be involved as part of their federal mandate to invest at least 5% of their funds to develop products that would benefit agriculture. Brian says PERC is about a $50 million dollar/year program btw.

With all the efforts to reduce our dependence on foreign oil he says that propane holds great promise as one of the alternative fuels that will help us meet our goals over the next 10 years. For example, he says that they’ve done research which conservatively shows that propane can displace about 1 billion gallons of gas by the year 2017.

Brian says that there’s a federal tax credit of 50 cents/gallon for on and off road use of the fuel in vehicles which is money back in the pocket of those who use a fuel that right now is very competitive with highly priced gas. Brian also says that every R&D project PERC funds has to have a commercialization component so that there’s a plan for how to bring products to market after they are developed.

You can listen to my interview with Brian here: propane-days-07-feehan.mp3