The problem with Natural Gas is that there’s only enough of it because we don’t use it to drive out cars.
If any significant number of people switch to NG cars, the price will double and the supply will plummet.
In fact, there are a lot of oil people who are saying that the real shortage even now isn’t oil, but natural gas.
Also, natural gas is the perfect energy source for heating people’s houses, and for emergency/peak power generation. So why waste it on driving cars around.
Electric motors are GREAT at moving things, we should be focusing on solving the problem of electric cars. That way, we can charge them with whatever initial energy source is most available.
BTW, interesting side note: One of the power plants here in Virginia can actually burn WOOD to generate electricity.
That's true using current technology but there's also 5 quadrillion cubic meters of methane ice on the ocean floor. This came from the microbial reduction of CO2. Possibly genetically engineered microbes could create more natural gas by eating un-extractable coal and oil deposits.
We have huge amounts of NG in the Rocky Mtn. region of the US. Absolutely huge.
Trouble is, quite of a bunch of it was locked away by the Clinton-era “roadless forests” initiative.
But there are other sources of NG - Right now, there is a huge boom in Wyoming where drillers are extracting methane from coal beds - just drill down into a sloppy formation of lignite and pipe off the gas.
Domestic heating is one of the areas where we could see the greatest returns by conservation (eg, better insulation in doors and windows, then in walls, etc) and by use of things as simple as passive solar heating systems and better design of houses. Using NG for heating homes is a solution only for the pure decadence and sloth of the American public.
Absent that, we could be using lots of other things for the heating plant on housing other than natural gas - starting with burning wood, for example. Everyone decries how fat Americans are.
Well, if Joe and Jane had to go out and split a few cords of wood every year, they’d get skinny in a hurry. Sure kept me skinny as a kid. Wood is CO2 neutral, so the greenies have no issues there.
The biggest problem with electric cars is the battery technology. Even as we’ve made rapid and large strides in motors, control systems, etc in electric motivation, the battery technology is lagging far behind. When you solve that problem, you just expose the lack of transmission capacity in the grid, followed by a lack of generation capacity. The amount of investment necessary to upgrade the grid to allow even 10% of the driving public to use rechargeable cars is staggering. The amount of investment required to allow 50% of the cars on the road to be replaced with rechargeable electrics requires an amount of money not extant in the US markets right now, absent huge government subsidies and direct payments.
If we really wanted to leap forward in a practical way with hybrid technology, we’d be using diesel engine to drive a hybrid, not a gas engine. 100+ MPG is entirely feasible.