I’m not an expert, but I had a client for several years who did CNG conversions on fleet vehicles. The costs were 1500-2500 per vehicle. CNG is efficient and burns clean.
I’m not a supporter of T. “Boondoggle,” but CNG is a good alternative fuel, IMO.
There is NO infrastructure! It would take years to get fueling stations built. The best alternative is a home compressor. They are over $10k and do you want 5000psi CNG next to your house?
Everybody is missing the point with T.Boone. The windmills are a ruse to get water rights in the wind corridor and the Nat Gas stuff is because he owns a boat load of CHK stock. ( And COP, which is also big in nat gas). He's 80 and a billionaire, but it's still about money,....his money.
I'm not against nat gas, but it should be for city vehicles and company vehicles, like the phone co. or UPS, or the post office. They could install their own re-fuelers and leave the gasoline for us.
“Can any of our FReeper experts tell us if conversion to a dual fuel for gasoline and natural gas is significantly different than a propane conversion ?”
I spent about six years of my engineering career designing control systems for natural gas engines for both power generation and vehicle use. These were “lean burn” natural gas engines, and generated extremely low emissions. They are very cost effective in certain applications.
Many people mistakenly call propane “natural gas”. But they are two different things. Propane is propane. Natural gas is mostly methane with other combustible gases comprising the balance. CNG is much safer to handle than propane. Being mostly methane, which is lighter than air, a spill just “floats” away. Propane sinks to the ground and hangs around ready to be ignited.
Doing a gasoline to propane (or gasoline to CNG) conversion basically means throwing away your existing fuel system (injectors or carburetor, fuel pump, fuel tank, etc., and replacing it with another fuel system specifically designed to run on propane or CNG versus gasoline. There are commercially available kits to do just this for many V8 engines.
It would be complex and costly to implement a dual fuel strategy for propane or CNG and gasoline, because you essentially need two different fuel systems; one for handling a liquid fuel, and another for handling a gaseous fuel.
Natural gas, as it comes from the well, is abundant here in the US and Canada. But it is also highly variable from a qualitative perspective. The quantity of methane in natural gas can vary widely. This means that the energy density of natural gas can vary tremendously.
The “methane index” is used to denote the actual percentage of methane in the gas, and is standardized in commercial natural gas heating fuel, so that you know how much energy you’re buying per cubic foot of gas.
The other problem with natural gas is that it contains impurities such as sulfur which can make it unusable for low emissions vehicular use without refining. Even with a standardized, commercial blend of CNG, you’d never meet EPA or CARB emissions requirements unless you remove all the impurities.
If we didn’t have all the emissions requirements that we do, we could easily produce vehicle engines that would run very well on the same stuff that comes out of your stove, and we’ve got lot’s of that. There are many places in the western part of the country that have irrigation pumps and other devices running on converted V8’s burning natural gas coming directly out of the ground from a well.