E-jeepney can withstand weekly gas price spike

GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc, The Philippine Star, Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Obviously high fuel prices are here to stay. The factors that pushed crude oil rates to $135 per barrel will remain. Fast-growing China and India will continue to gulp down more oil. Searches for alternative fuels will still be slow. Oil powers will continue to hoard dollars and euros with which to buy the world’s largest food, pharmaceutical and electronics companies. Oil may even hit $200 by early 2009.

So what’s the government doing to ease the jab of fuel price spikes on consumers? Nothing. On the contrary, it even raised jeepney and bus fares to appease its transport sector allies. And it has rejected calls to lower the taxes on imported fuel and royalties on local ones. Cabinet men appear to have lost the creativity they displayed in hiding from the public the details of the fertilizer, NBN-ZTE and swine scams.

One feasible solution is staring them in the face. Oddly they haven’t noticed. The usual “kickbackers” probably see no money in it.

The electric jeepney has been in operation for a year now. Deployed in Makati, Baguio, Puerto Princesa and Bacolod in April to October, it has proved to drivers and commuters its practicability in the face of weekly fuel price hikes. The 15-seater e-jeepney runs not on the usual diesel or gasoline but on battery power. All it needs is an eight-hour charge overnight of its special battery, and it can run 100-120 km at a safe top speed of 40 kph. That means that on a usual five-km jeepney route, say Washington-Ayala in Makati, the e-jeepney can run up to three days on a single battery charge — costing only P110-P140, in lieu of the usual P1,500 a day for fossil fuels.

The savings not only can improve the drivers’ incomes, but also be passed on to commuters.

There are other benefits. The e-jeepney does not emit toxic fumes that cause lung cancer, chronic cough and other respiratory ailments. It does not smog up the city. It does not deplete foreign reserves the way oil imports do.

And since it’s assembled cheap on funding by the environmentalist Green Renewable Independent Power Producer (GRIPP), there’s no room for bribes. The e-jeepney does not induce corruption, and that’s probably why government isn’t so hot about it.

It took the Department of Transportation and Communication all of ten months to classify the e-jeepney and so enable its registration as a road vehicle. The classification was by no means sophisticated, as in rating jet liners for weight and consequent load on airport runways. The DOTC was simply too slow to come up with a unique English term for the e-jeepney: “low-speed vehicle”. Hooray!

Fortunately, the private sector is filling the void left by do-nothing government, Sen. Pia Cayetano reports. The Motor Vehicle Parts Manufacturers Association of the Philippines has linked up with GRIPP to produce four-dozen e-jeepneys locally. That will be further foreign currency savings, as the e-jeepneys are presently assembled in China. It can also be an economic booster as well.

But the government doesn’t see that. In has always been slow to support new energy-saving ideas. As far back as 2002, for instance, Shell had announced that it could supply and compress natural gas from Palawan’s Malampaya well to run public transport vehicles. Operators sounded out the Development Bank of the Philippines for loans to convert diesel bus engines into CNG and set up filling stations at depots. Everyone was enthusiastic, except the DOTC.

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Coconut farmers never had it so good. With new but simple know-how, they can now extract three types of biofuels: ethanol from tuba (coco-wine), methane from the decomposing shell, and biodiesel from copra. All three products have ready markets, and mean added cash in the pockets of coco planters. That’s why the Cooperative of Coconut Development Farmers and Expansion Workers is resisting plans to suspend the biofuels program.

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E-mail: jariusbondoc@workmail.com