Posted on 07/31/2009 3:00:53 PM PDT by ckilmer
CNG is a gas compressed to 3000PSI. LNG or propane is a liquid compressed to about 350PSI. Vehicles have been run on propane for decades and the technology is advanced. Controls on LNG are simple and well tested. CNG is another story. It is not run through the injectors in a car but through the intake and computer control to meet emissions and efficient running could be quite expensive.
The market is deciding. If this is such cheap fuel and the true conversion or purpose-built vehicle is so cheap and wonderful, why aren’t fleet users demanding them from the car makers?
Check out the fuel mileage/Btu content of the fuel. A local bakery company here with lots of local deliveries tried it out with their vans. The range was about 50 miles and that was with a high pressure tank much bigger than gasoline or diesel. The drivers could not go far, and then refueling took much longer than for gasoline or diesel.
If you want to double or triple the number of vehicles and drivers you need, and you want to pay drivers to stand around refueling or waiting to refuel, invest heavily in a CNG fleet. But use your own money, please, not taxpayer subsidies. I already know it’s not efficient, so I don’t care to pay for the education.
Well, I think we agree on that. Remove unnecessary regulations and also remove unnecessary subsidies, and then let the market decide. If it decides “No,” that’s just fine.
I have been interested in alternative energy sources for decades. However there are very good reasons why gas and diesel have been the leading choice for ground transportation since the dawn of the automobile. It is not difficult to convert a vehicle to alternative fuels; in most cases it is very easy. The OBDII computers in most fuel injected gasoline vehicles manufactured in the past ten years can handle the conversion with no modifications. All that is needed are minor changes in the fuel delivery system, sensors and the addition of tanks capable of holding the compressed or liquefied gas.
As a professional firefighter for more than twenty years however I can say that the tanks do create vehicles actually capable of causing the types of explosions normally only seen in Hollywood productions. The ability of the tanks to survive rifle rounds without exploding is a completely different situation than actual damage from high speed crashes and flame impingement. There is no debate that these tanks have far more explosive potential than a tank full of gasoline.
The most significant hurdles to using these gasses are the supply chain, safety, efficiency and convenience. LPG, LNG, CNG, hydrogen and other compressed or liquefied gases simply cannot equal the advantages of gasoline or diesel oil without a significant price incentive. We reached that level for some uses when prices for gasoline and diesel spiked recently. At this time LPG is more expensive to use in vehicles than either gasoline or diesel. CNG currently costs approximately the same as gasoline or diesel, but it does not stack up when one takes supply chain, safety, efficiency and convenience into account.
If global warming truly was a concern and not a giant hoax, it might make sense for the government to provide incentives to use these alternative fuels. Either way there is no excuse for the EPA to put up huge hurdles to their use.
There are huge unexploited oil shale and oil sand reserves in the Midwest. We have huge unexploited oil reserves off both coasts, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the barren arctic wastelands of Canada and Alaska. We have huge reserves of coal that can be converted into gasoline by processes known and demonstrated more than sixty years ago. There are also oil fields in the United States and throughout the world which were thought to have been pumped dry which have become productive again. This was through either some unknown adiabatic process or seepage from undetected reserves dozens of miles below the surface.
Even with constantly increasing demand the world still has hundreds of years of easily accessible sources of diesel and gasoline. It is only through intentional government restrictions that the price of energy is artificially inflated. These restrictions are causing the United States to transfer trillions of dollars to backwards despots who want to kill the very hands that are feeding them. I have nothing against using alternative forms of energy for transportation except that they are not viable without the continuation of the restrictive energy policies that are currently bleeding our economy dry.
As a owner of a CNG company, we have solved the distribution problem. The virtual pipeline will be able to supply cheaper CNG comparable to gasoline.
It does work; it’s cleaner...and is achievable.
“Why would the EPA be against converting to natural gas. They should be pushing this cleaner burning (and cheaper) fuel.”
Because the energy supply hasn’t been nationalized, yet.
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