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The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : LAX: A Unique Alternative-Fuel Laboratory : Energy: With their limited-distance drives, airport vehicles are easily monitored and refueled.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Los Angeles International Airport, the world’s fourth-busiest, has become the hottest testing ground in the country for research and demonstration programs in alternative fuels.

In the latest project, Southern California Gas Co. and the Los Angeles Department of Airports this week unveiled three airport shuttles powered by liquefied natural gas--the first such vehicles in the country. Airport officials plan to replace the rest of their 46-bus diesel fleet with the alternative-fuel shuttles over the next few years and to have a permanent fueling facility in place within 18 months.

Elsewhere at the airport, electric baggage trains, propane vans and natural gas forklifts tote freight and luggage, airline snacks and fuel. Electric vehicle recharging stations, already in place in the United Airlines terminal area, will be built into the latest parking addition. And the second of two compressed natural gas fueling terminals will be installed by the end of the year.

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Airports, as it happens, are uniquely suited to showcase alternative fuels.

“It has primarily to do with economics,” says Warren I. Mitchell, president of Southern California Gas Co. “When you get into an operation where it is highly predictable--how far the vehicles will travel, when they will refuel--it allows you to optimize the infrastructure design. And you want a relatively high utilization of the refueling infrastructure.”

An airport plays well to these strengths--and downplays the major drawbacks of alternative fuels.

“For most of these jobs, range isn’t a big factor,” says Bill Van Amburg, a spokesman for Calstart, the public-private consortium attempting to foster an advanced transportation industry in California.

“You’re doing these loops,” Van Amburg says of an airport vehicle’s typically repetitive work pattern. “And all the refueling can be done at a central refueling site.”

For their part, airport authorities and their tenant airlines have taken a keen interest in clean-fuel vehicles because they are under the regulatory gun as major air polluters. Air pollution regulations mandate that both the airlines and ground transporters in Southern California dramatically cut emissions over the next six years.

The result is an unequaled panorama of alternative-fuel projects.

Of Super Shuttle’s fleet of 140 vans in Los Angeles and Orange counties, 22 run on propane and two on natural gas. Hertz Corp. will field the nation’s largest fleet of alternative-fuel rental cars--up to 1,000 Ford Tauruses that can switch from methanol to gasoline--at LAX and other Southern California airports over the next two years. Electric vehicles ranging from large buses to pickups are being added to the airport’s own fleet.

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United Airlines, with the largest facility at LAX, is experimenting the most among the airlines so far.

In the past two years, 56 of United’s 350 motorized vehicles have been converted to run on electricity, propane or natural gas. More will be converted this year.

“Specific operations lend themselves to specific alternative fuels,” says Walter B. Harri son, manager of United’s plant and equipment maintenance at LAX.

Compressed natural gas seems to work well for bigger vehicles that not only pull heavy loads but also need to be roadworthy, Harrison has found. Now being powered by natural gas are two high-speed tugs that move large air-freight containers, three 19-passenger vans, a lavatory service truck, a couple of forklifts and a belt loader, which places bags and cargo into the “belly pits” of aircraft.

Inside United’s immense, congested luggage-handling room, zero-emission vehicles--in this case electrics--”are the best to use and most comfortable for our employees,” Harrison says.

“We’ve had our problems,” he says, “but we’re very encouraged. . . . It’s doable.”

LAX is also part of the National Airport Electrification Study, an effort to find the best uses of electric power at air terminals that is sponsored by U.S. electric utilities and the Electric Power Research Institute, the Palo Alto-based industry group.

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The airport is a good showcase with its 45 million visitors a year. “When you put something out there, it’s going to get worldwide attention,” says Thomas J. Doughty, director of electric

transportation at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

“The airport is like a little city, a microcosm of the larger cityscape,” Doughty says. “You can try different mixes of transportation systems.”

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