Why Natural Gas-Run Vehicles Pay Gasoline Taxes

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

The natural gas industry – with some financial help from the Corbett Administration – is making a big push to increase the amount of natural gas-fueled vehicles on Pennsylvania’s roadways.
The argument in favor of natural gas cars and trucks: the fuel is much cheaper than gasoline and diesel, and emissions are much more environmentally-friendly. The con: there aren’t many places to refuel your vehicle.
Still, experts expect more natural gas-fueled vehicles to hit the roadways in the coming years. With that in mind, a reader asked the Allentown Morning Call whether these cars and trucks – which don’t run on gasoline – pay gas taxes. The answer? They do.

Those who drive compressed natural gas, or CNG, vehicles pay the same highway tax on the fuel they burn as us gasoline-burning warriors, according to industry officials. The rate is derived using a formula that equates the energy value of natural gas with that of gasoline.

 Measured in BTUs, a gallon of gas equates to 5.66 pounds of CNG, said Richard Kolodziej, president of the advocacy group Natural Gas Vehicles for America. For a sense of how much CNG that represents, standard barbecue grills use 20-pound tanks.

Pennsylvania maps a similar course, applying an energy-equivalency formula, and the state charges a total of 31.2 cents per gallon for gasoline — the sum of the “straight” 12-cent “liquid fuels” tax and the oil-company franchise tax of 19.2 cents per gallon.

StateImpact Pennsylvania compared the commonwealth’s gasoline taxes to other states’ earlier this year:

Penn­syl­va­nia levies a 32.3 cent state tax, on top of the 18.4 cent fed­eral rate. That’s good for the fifteenth-highest rate in the county.  Of the six states that bor­der Penn­syl­va­nia, only New York (49 cents) and West Vir­ginia (33.4 cents) have higher rates.
Pennsylvania’s east­ern neigh­bor, New Jer­sey, boasts the 48^th–low­est gas tax in the coun­try. Only Alaska and Wyoming charge lower per-gallon rates than New Jersey’s 14.5 cents.

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