In March 2020, the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business hosted a Global Executive Forum Learning Experience for their Executive MBA (“EMBA”) students. One of the key aspects of this Global Executive Forum learning experience is to provide EMBA students the opportunity to gain regional and international exposure, and work with the top talent from around the world. For this meeting, discussion centered around the theme: “Sustainable Business.” The forum served as a collaborative environment for students and guest lecturers to network and knowledge-share on best practices, challenges and experiences in implementing more sustainable business strategies.
The meeting featured keynote presentations from William A. Sapon, Sr. Clean Energy & Transportation Advisor at Peoples Natural Gas and from Rick Price, Executive Director at the Pittsburgh Region Clean Cities. Through these lectures, EMBA students learned about sustainable strategies in a variety of contexts, including how alternative vehicle fuels and biofuels can help mitigate climate change. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs), such as electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) and compressed natural gas (NGVs) vehicles, as a promising option for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and reducing energy consumption. Road transportation produces significant amounts of CO2, the most important greenhouse gas (GHG), by using petroleum-based fuels as primary energy source. A reduction of CO2 emissions can be achieved by implementing alternative vehicle fuel (AVF) chains.
The adoption of alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) has been regarded as one of the most important strategies to address the issues of energy dependence, air quality, and, more recently, climate change. Despite decades of effort, we still face daunting challenges to promote wider acceptance of AFVs by the general public. Both Peoples and PRCC continue to promote the use of alternative vehicle fuels and technologies and through our efforts in our region, in 2018, we displaced 8,534,039 gallons of petroleum-based fuels and reduced GHG emissions by 10,599 tons.
“Renewable natural gas, a biofuel, takes waste streams that produce emissions and puts them to use as clean energy, dramatically reducing greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change,” said William A. Sapon, Sr. Clean Energy & Transportation Advisor at Peoples. “The good news is that we already interconnected to five landfill gas plants that inject RNG into our pipeline system, with a sixth one coming online by the end of 2020.”
Article originally published in the Pittsburgh Region Clean Cities Newsletter.