Ground Broken at Lambert Airport for Public Natural Gas Fueling Station

Thursday morning, St. Louis city, county and other public officials broke ground Thursday morning at the site of the first public compressed natural gas facility at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.

The site will serve as the first ever Spire CNG station, a collaborative natural fueling solutions effort between Laclede Group and Siemens.

“We saw a tremendous opportunity to drive the Spire brand,” Mike Spotanski, senior vice president and Chief Innovation and Integration Officer for The Laclede Group, said. “To get our first fueling station in our own backyard is great.”

CNG has a number of clean-burning properties that are good and healthy for the environment, according to a factsheet from the Environmental Protection Agency. Cars running off CNG have less exhaust and greenhouse gas emissions as well.

Spotanski explained that while cars aren’t widely available on the commercial market for consumers, a number of fleet vehicles have begun to run off the fuel and is where a number of the contracts for the fueling station will come from.

Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge, Director of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, said Lambert already has two CNG fueling stations, which date back to the 1980s. Hamm-Niebruegge said the airport is a partner with the St. Louis City’s sustainable plans, which was approved earlier this year and has a 317-point goals and objective plan, and has been focused on growing its sustainability efforts. 

She said so far, approximately 65 percent of the airport’s fleet is natural gas or some alternative fuel based and hopes to expand that even further. She didn't have any approximate figures for traffic, but she expected that once open, it will keep busy being close to the interstate and open to the public.

The station, which is located on one acre of Super Park Lot C facility at I-70 and Cypress Road should be open by the end of the year.