Posted on 03/18/2011 8:49:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
With nearly 12 million vehicles around the world running on compressed natural gas these days, but only 120,000 of them in the U.S., opportunity looms in a country that is weary of expensive crude oil from increasingly unfriendly nations and home to a vast supply of natural gas.
“Without question, natural gas will allow our country to transition our transportation system away from expensive and carbon-heavy gasoline and diesel towards carbon-light, affordable American produced natural gas,” says Aubrey K. McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy.
McClendon’s company, the second-largest natural gas producer in the country, is trumpeting the discovery in the past three years of what most energy experts call a 120-year supply of inexpensive domestic natural gas that can be brought to the surface with revolutionary new drilling technologies. Thirty-two of the 50 US states now produce their own natural gas.
Chesapeake and other producers also are actively engaged in the buildout of filling stations that serve CNG-powered vehicles. The current paucity of them—less than 1,000 nationwide versus 200,000 gasoline stations—is viewed by most experts as the chief impediment to more widespread use.
“Producers like Encana, Chesapeake, Apache and Pioneer are aggressively seeding the market,” says Rich Kolodziej, president of Natural Gas Vehicles America, a Washington, D.C.-based trade association. “They have the self-interest to get out and cause stations to be built, by underwriting some of the cost.
“It all comes down to taking risk off the back of the station operator,” he adds. “Service station operators serve customers, they don’t create them. For natural gas to gain acceptance as an everyday transportation fuel, someone has to beat the bushes to create customers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
It's gas fumes that are explosive.
That’s why it’s very hard to get an explosive fuel-air mixture in a car. However, a rupturing NG cylinder instantly produces a very explosive atmosphere.
Dang! I guess I’ve lived all these years without ever knowing how a carburetor works!
As in a catastrophic rupture of the fuel container rarely results in any kind of explosion. Quite easy to do with NG though.
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