Issue date: 1/23/08 Section: NEWS

Media Credit: Jonny Carroll Illustration for story about Texas' carbon footprint

Environmentally conscious north Texans have not breathed easy since the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced that the Lone Star State leads the nation in carbon emissions. Many NT students and faculty continue to work to keep Earth inhabitable.
Charlie Jackson, NT executive director of facilities, said the university has been working to make the campus more environmentally friendly since 1996, when it developed an energy savings utilities contract.
"We used the money we saved on utilities to improve operations," he said.
However, Jackson said the university is "not actively pursuing alternative energy sources."
He said officials thought about using natural gas but the plan fell apart because heating isn't as important in Texas.
However, when the new life science building is finished, it will use energy supplied by Denton Municipal Electric via its Greensense renewable energy program.
"If we use renewable energy sources, we get more points from the Environmental Protection Agency. It costs more but it's worth it," Jackson said.
The facilities department is currently assessing all "vehicular assets," Jackson said, to determine "the best approach to downsizing, which will save gas. We can't use our big vehicles very often."
The department already has several dual-fuel vehicles, which use a combination of compressed natural gas and petroleum.
In 2001 the environmental science department used money donated from the Environmental Protection Agency, ENrG Inc. and the North Central Texas Council of Government, to acquire a bus that runs completely on compressed natural gas.
The bus, a brainchild of Ken Dixon of the biology department, was intended as a demonstration of how vehicles could run on alternative fuel, said Brian Wheeler of the Elm Fork Education Center.
Six months after Elm Fork bought the bus, the Dallas-Fort Worth airport borrowed it to see if it could develop an on-site fleet of such vehicles. Now, all the airport's non-aviation vehicles run on compressed natural gas.
Wheeler said that compressed natural gas is a "significantly cleaner form of fuel."
He frequently finds himself transporting UNT and Denton Independent School District students to and from Elm Fork.
"We're a spoiled nation. We like to consume. Although we make up five percent of the world's population, we use 25 percent of its energy and produce 30 percent of its trash."

Continued...

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