Cautiously heartening.
Will LNG ever be able to compete with crude oil imports as a feed stock for fuel for cars and trucks?
Traditional refineries “crack” oil. Can they “splice” gas? Direct LNG powering is possible too, but needs special design.
NG is extremely efficient as a motor fuel. Very clean at it too.
Several oil companies are using natural gas to make petroleum products, especially motor oil. Shell’s Pennzoil division has been doing this for a number of years for their synthetic motor oils.
CNG is already used in many public busses and gas industry vehicles. Burns clean, engines last longer. It’s fairly cheap (several thousand dollars) to make a vehicle able to run either gasoline or CNG.
The downsides are:
1) The need for an additional CNG tank
2) Starting an engine with CNG is difficult in cold weather
3) CNG has less energy output than gasoline, making it less efficient for towing and hills.
All of the downsides are manageable, and the auto industry looked like it was headed toward stock dual fuel use vehicles UNTIL Obama was elected and pushed them to electric.
“All of the downsides are manageable, and the auto industry looked like it was headed toward stock dual fuel use vehicles UNTIL Obama was elected and pushed them to electric.”
I was going to say the same - just shows the power of the president. Left alone, we’d be well on our way towards a good number of cars running on natural gas.