Posted on 05/23/2008 6:18:33 AM PDT by NoLibZone
Europeans can buy cars that run on natural gas from at least eight automakers, but despite large reserves of the relatively inexpensive fuel in the United States, the federal government and states, including Massachusetts, are backing pricier biofuels as a way to lessen dependence on imported oil.
(Excerpt) Read more at oilkills.org ...
Yes. It's called oil. It can be found in many places, such as ANWR (Alaska), Colorado, northern Midwest, Gulf of Mexico, off Florida's Atlantic coast......
LOL! Shhh. I don’t want to get you in trouble. Maybe a PM?
Coal to oil via Fisher-Tropsch for aircraft and trucks.
Nuke Plants for the Plug in part of the Series Hybrids, and eventually replace the coal plants.
IT is that simple.....
This is blueprint for energy self sufficiency in America in the near term IMHO and we need the guts to drill, build, and re-tool, and we don't have anyone with guts in Washington to say it or have a vision.
Can't natural gas be handled similarly to propane? There is plenty of propane delivery infrastructure in this country. Seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to augment propane with natural gas, without investing a whole lot in different technology.
Disclaimer: I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, okay? :)
I agree with your blueprint, but not with NG. Save that for heating. I would go nuclear (building more plants than we can use) and clean coal. Power the fleet vehicles electric or hydrogen fuel cell and power the heavy stuff with biodiesel made from algae, trash, or anything else. Butanol is also an option.
No, Natural Gas requires significant compression to be transported economically.
For now anyway I think using natural gas for fleet vehicles works where they can fill up at their base and I’ve seen them around. Using it for over the road travel might be problematic but the farmers I used to work for had their trucks set up with the ability to carry both butane and gas and could switch over when they needed to. I’m not sure how cost efficient it would be if it was widespread. Certainly the cost of NG would go up and negate some of the advantages.
Different product. LP, aka “propane” is what is left over at the top of the distillation column when oil is refined. Sometimes you see it just “flared” off at the top of a refinery stack.
LP can be compressed to liquid at much, much lower pressures and latent energies. Liquid propane won’t boil off - it stays liquid quite happily at ambient temps and you can draw it out of tanks in either liquid or gaseous form.
Compression of natural gas to liquid requires a cryo tank and you’re going to lose some LNG all the time while your car is sitting in the sun and the cryo tank is warming up. Same sort of problem with liquid H2.
The best way for most people to use NG would be as compressed natural gas (CNG).
What always puzzled me about Schwan’s trucks is that they don’t use the expansion of the LPG gas from liquid to gas to cool the product compartment at all. The cold in that box is merely a really good chill-down when they plug in the compressor back at their home base (or on the road) and then the drivers are instructed to never open two doors at the same time so that they don’t get a big push of warm air into the product box.
Yeah, I was a schwan’s guy. It was a mystery to me as well why we never had a system like that. The box does stay cold enough most of year except for those 90+ degree days. It has to be kept at least under -10 or the ice cream will get soft (which happens when the door is opened 90 times a day).
I will tell you though the 8.1L big block fricken scoots on propane though. What is LP’s octane rating like 114? My truck was a gmc topkick 5500 which weighed fully loaded at the truck scale just under 19,000lbs. and I won a stop light race against a geo metro sh*t box by a half a car length. For a heavy truck that thing got going. :D
Yep, they could move down the road. In Nevada, the guys who drove trucks down into central Nevada had huge routes - they’d go from Elko down to Round Mountain. They’d sleep in motels on the road - take the truck down into small towns, sell their stuff for two to four days, working their way back up into Elko. They’d drive and sell stuff all day, then hole up at a motel at night and plug in their trucks for the next day.
In the summer, given that there’s lots of folks out on remote farms and ranches, Schwan’s is about the only way to get ice cream into your home in summer. There’s just no other way for most people to drive 120+ miles to town, shop for food and get ice cream home in a frozen state unless it is winter and you’re driving a pickup truck where you can chuck the frozen stuff out in the bed.
I think the octane rating of propane is somewhere from 105 to 110 - 114 sounds a tad high to me, but it could be. Most LPG isn’t pure propane - it is often a mixture of propane and butane in varying amounts.
We really liked Schwan’s products. Good quality products, brought to our farm gate. Liked all the guys and gals who were our drivers. They’re a wonderful service for folks out in remote areas. I once got a free half-gallon of ice cream for hauling the Schwan’s truck out of a mudhole in a neighbor’s driveway. Truck was heavily loaded, got mired up to the axle. Took only a moment with a Deere 4440 to haul it right out.
I woulda gave you a box of steaks if you pulled me out of a mud hole.
Friends of ours run a F350 on propane, the real kicker is he bumped up the compression ratio and the thing will tear the rear end out of the truck... he’s had to beef up the suspension points and have stout transmissions built for it.
It really hauls!!
4 tire fire duallie on propane.
George Bush's own brother wanted (and got) drilling off the Florida coast restricted when he was that state's governor. Pointing fingers ain't gettin' nothing done.
That would be fun to drive!
I don't care if it doesn't get anything done, I like many others are mad as hell at the fact that bad decisions have been made for over ten years in regards to no long range planning. The Sierra Club nixed nuke plants from Clinton via campaign cash, Carter banned recycling spent nuke fuel, Clinton Vetoed ANWR to name just three.
Now image if these three issues were done just the opposite.
Oh, ya by the way Jeb is another NIMBY farknocker in my book, right up their with the do nothings in the House and Senate.
If the GOP had any, they would make all their reps not run in 08' and get 535 new faces. All recently discharged Officers from our Armed Forces to run would suit me fine, at least I know they would "get-r-done".
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