up in the parking lot of my bank. This recharging station is FREE! Who built it I don't
know but I'm sure my tax dollars did.
CNBC has Santelli doing pieces all day today on NG conversion for vehicles that can be fueled in your own garage. Sadly they will go nowhere until the politicians figure out how to tax them.
That makes no sense. You might be able to say that they have less power for a given cylinder size. You might say that a "gallon" of compressed natural gas has less energy than a gallon of gasoline. But you can run locomotives on natural gas, so power isn't a problem.
Sounds like some rather spectacular vehicle crashes are just around the corner.
NG powered vehicles are a proven technology that has been around for decades and even refueling could be easily accomplished with existing infrastructure. The big advantage is NG powered vehicles don’t have the very limited range that will always plague electric vehicles.
Electric is oil since that is where the electricity comes from that you plug into your home to get.
Natural gas is an interesting option, but of course what happens if a car rolls over in an accident is the big worry.
What a shame, I mean sham.
I’d go for CNG. Electricity is a “derivative” form of power. You can’t mine or drill for electricity, it has to be made from another source (unless you’re willing to buy into solar and wind electic sources, which I’d support if they’d work efficiently). From all accounts CNG is plentiful in this country. I’m no scientist, so I don’t know what sort of “refining” (for lack of a better word) is required to make CNG usable, but I have to assume that it is easier than refining oil (I stand to be corrected.)
Of course infrastructure is an issue, but that is true of electric refueling also.
For the record, I drive a Prius (we own two of them) and they have been very good cars. But I’d switch to CNG if it were available and supported for fueling.
I live in a Chicago suburb and the nearest place that I can refuel a CNG car is 25 miles away.
If there’s as much natural gas in the US/Canada as I’ve read there is it seems that gas might be the better option.Perhaps even by a wide margin.But for the next 30+ years (at *least*) *oil* is gonna be absolutely *crucial* for the economies of the developed nations.
You could retrofit an over the road truck (or other diesel vehicle) with a system that fumigates the intake air on the diesel engine with CNG. You can replace as much as 60-70% of the diesel fuel demand with CNG. If you run out of CNG, the truck reverts back to 100% diesel. The two biggest expenses to the conversion are the Kevlar tank on the truck to store the CNG and the compressor to fill it up.
No thanks. I’ll walk.
Converting thermal energy to motive power directly beats thermal to motive to electricity to the the grid to storage to motive power any day, and it always will for the passenger car as we know it.
The only way electric vehicles will make economic sense is if we relocate the entire U.S. population to large cities serviced by combined heat and power generating plants. The catch 22 is that if everyone lives in giant cities, who would need cars?
Electricity requires energy to make it, and with our present technology, it isn’t practical. We still have plenty of oil to exploit from deep wells and shale, and then we have natural gas and an endless supply of methanol. Who knows, by the time there is nothing left but solar and wind power to charge batteries, we could develop anti gravitic shoes. The best way to get there is to quit trying to control the outcome. Let free people compete.
None of the above. Electric cars have no range, and I ain’t sticking flammable gas under pressure in my car.
How about GTL as an alternative. I have been doing some research on this and found that besides diesel it can be converted to gasoline. The question is at what cost. At least the BTU cost of natural gas to oil is currently about 10 %. The process is old technolgy, but some are working on improving it.
http://www.chevron.com/deliveringenergy/gastoliquids/
None of the Above because 100 million people will dispatch Obama to an early retirement before they’ll be forced to trade in their cars.
That tells me that the natural market for natgas vehicles is commercial fleets in urban areas.