Energy company saves fuel despite low prices

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. achieves 10% fuel saving with X-1R.

Back in 2015 when the price of fuel kept falling with what felt like no end in sight, the sales of gas guzzlers were bolstered while the sales of electric and hybrid vehicles tumbled. In the year prior, Fiat’s Chrysler division achieved the highest sales ever for its Jeep brand, with sales of Ram trucks jumping a massive 28%; General Motors’ pick-up sales rose a staggering 43% in December; and even with production drop due to factory retooling, the Ford F-150 remained the most popular vehicle in the States for the 33rd consecutive year.

So it would seem that the more pernickety environmentalists were right – we are never going to solve global warming until we reduce our dependency on fossil fuel, and profits and savings will always rule. But at least one company in the United States is still finding ways to reduce its fuel usage, despite the cheap fuel in the market, and it is aptly an energy company. The San Diego Gas and Electric Company (SDGE) is a utility company under the Sempra Energy Group, one of the Fortune 500’s with revenues of more than US$10.5 billion. The San Diego operation alone has a sizeable fleet of 2,200 vehicles; that’s a whole lot of fuel needed.

But the company is still mindful of its impact on the environment. In 2015, it conducted a long-term test on X-1R products to verify their efficiency gains claim. In the results of the six-month-long test using nine of its pick-ups, SDGE found that by adding the X-1R Engine Treatment and XR20P Gasoline Treatment, a remarkable 10.21% improvement in fuel economy was achieved compared to the vehicles’ petrol consumption prior to being treated with the products.

A spokesperson for X-1R said, “We are pleased that the result was so positive, although we routinely achieve this level of fuel saving for our customers; this is why people like NASA use our range of products.”

Sempra serves 31 million consumers worldwide, and a 10% reduction in fuel utilisation across the entire group could result in massive overhead reduction, not to mention a whole lot less pollution to the environment. At this time there is no news on whether Sempra will treat all of their vehicles with X-1R, but the US-based fuel additive manufacturer is hopeful that a contract to do so will be forthcoming shortly.

The CEO of X-1R Global Ltd, Nigel McKenzie, said in a separate statement, “Even with the recent fall in the price of oil and the prediction that prices will stay at these levels for at least three years, there is a need to ensure that we conserve our fuel resources and look for ways to reduce pollution. X-1R has been proven time and time again to deliver improvements in fuel economy and reductions in emissions whilst protecting against breakdowns and mechanical failure.”

If an energy company believes that fuel economy is still important even if there’s cheap fuel galore, maybe we should too.