Any opinions as to whether NG will make any inroads into transportation? I recently read that the long distance trucking industry is very interested in NG and that expanded use of NG would most likely first be seen there. Certainly, there would be far less infrature required to serve long distance truckers vs. automobiles. I’m referring to the number of truck stops in existance vs. the number of autobile gas stations.
LPG is commonly used as a vehicle fuel in some countries. A typical car engine can be run on LPG without changing the engine itself, just the fuel lines.
I don’t think natural gas is portable enough to be suitable as a vehicle fuel.
UPS disagrees:
(Of course every processing step involves its own energy inputs).
As long as natural gas is less expensive than other energy and available, ways will be found to use it. The biggest threat I see is governmental efforts to push renewable fuels. Methane is a very active greenhouse gas. A tank of LNG must continuously vent mathane. As long as a LNG vehicle is in use, it should use more methane than would be vented. An unused truck could be connected to a vapor recovery system at the terminal when not in use. As in Heurta’s link, a commercial fleet could make it work.
I stand corrected. (Sounds like it’s fine for larger vehicles and diesel conversions, LPG is easier for small vehicles).
Compressed natural gas vehicles have been around for awhile. Honda actually has a CNG powered Civic in the 2012 model year. I think for the intermediate-term (20 years), its biggest use will be in fleets (taxis, municipal vehicles and etc) because it provides cost advantages over gasoline and municipal governments and taxi companies will have centralized facilities all of their vehicles return to at the end of each work day. It’s a lot easier to install a CNG fueling facility for say, a fleet of 50 cars that all go back to the same station at the end of the day than it is to start deploying CNG pumps to all the consumer gas stations in the country.
Most natural gas vehicles I have seen used CNG not LNG (which I believe LNG needs to be cryogenic).
Honda has been selling the GX into select markets for several years now. You can buy a home refueling device for it, but I’m not sure it’s a win - it attaches to your gas line and has a compressor in it. It draws 800 watts while running, and takes several hours to refill the GX tank:
In particular, filling your NG vehicle off your home gas line gets you some savings because you don’t pay road tax on the fuel, while you do at a CNG station. The last I knew, they were letting this slide for right now, as with some other electric and alternative fuel vehicles, but that state of affairs wouldn’t last if it got to be common.
Plug in electric and NG vehicles fueled at home also put an extra load on those residential delivery systems. Even savings to the consumer become less than might be expected as most utility companies have a tiered rate structure for residential service whereby you pay more per unit for higher usage.
I wasn’t aware of that, without looking into the numbers I do think CNG is probably a bit more appropriate for fleet refueling centers. I have to think there would need to be extremely large costs savings per mile traveled of CNG versus regular or diesel fuel to justify the upfront costs of buying a home CNG compressor and offsetting the electricity cost.
The electricity cost isn’t that significant though…I could be wrong but I believe at 800 watts assuming two 3-hour refuels per month that’s 4.8 kWh a month which isn’t too crazy. I think your average Energy star refrigerator uses 1-2 kWh a day. That means you’d pay about $0.56/month on electricity (assuming national average of 11.6 cents per kWh.)
Right…that’s why it’s actually illegal to use the diesel that is intended for heating your house in your car. My understanding is it is totally usable in your average diesel auto, it’s just illegal to do so, and the reason it is a different color is there is a dye in it so theoretically if some inspector looked they’d know you were illegally using heating oil to power a vehicle in violation of the law.
Isn’t natural gas a byproduct of oil drilling? So that as we begin to run out of oil, won’t we also be running out of natural gas eventually, too?
So “It’s future” is limited, it would seem.
Yes and no.
Yes, it is a byproduct of petroleum drilling. However, it is also drilled for in its own right as well. I’m not sure if you’ve missed the news lately but in recent years a process colloquially known as “fracking” was developed, in which drillers can use water and other materials to essentially break up shale deposits that have large amounts of natural gas in them. When the shale breaks up, the gas is then able to be pumped to the surface.
Prior to the development of this technique it was known we had vast reserves of shale gas, but they were not considered economically feasible. While I’m sure I have some technical detail incorrect (since I’m not petroleum engineer or the like), basically we now have a ton of natural gas resources we’re just now starting to take advantage of, it has even lead to price decreases in natural gas and total known reserves in the United States have been increasing in recent years, not decreasing. I think the Department of Energy says based on what we know for sure right now we have at least 100 years of gas, and they are finding more all the time.
In the Eastern United States, under Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York, parts of Ohio, Virginia and Maryland may contain up to 1.3 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas. There are other large shale gas areas in the United States, Canada, and continental Europe that are just now being developed.
So while oil and natural gas are often pumped up together, it isn’t the case that we only have natural gas from oil wells.
Actually to amend what I just said, I don’t think it’s technically correct to call natural gas a “byproduct” of oil drilling. When you drill a big hole in the earth to pump petroleum up to the surface through, there’s no guarantee it is just bringing up the crude that you want. Natural gas is one of the other materials that frequently comes up with oil. In some wells I believe it is captured, stored, and sold. In others, the natural gas is just flared off because the operators have decided the cost of setting up facilities on site to capture the natural gas and sell it aren’t worth it and instead just basically treat it as a waste product.
But the word byproduct makes it sound like the natural gas is somehow intrinsically a product of the oil. That just isn’t the case, there have been dedicated natural gas wells for over 100 years (and shale wells as well, but they were considered economically marginal); the recent boom has mostly been about the new drilling technique that massively expanded the amount of natural gas we have at our fingertips and lowered its cost.
Could be. The UPS link specifically mentioned LNG. LNG is more energy dense, but you do have the venting problem. Like all other problems, there is an answer, but not always a pretty one.
The “run out of oil” thing is a bit complicated as well. Some of the shale beds contain fairly vast new amounts of oil as well as gas. Eagle Ford in South Texas is one example.
Up your figure a little bit - the range on the Honda GX isn’t great. The most optimistic claim (Honda’s) is about 225 - 250 miles on a tank. Even at a modest 12000 mi/yr, that’s going to be 4 fillups per month (250 is the optimistic figure, and you aren’t going to suck the tank dry before refill). If you use the vehicle for a long commute, it could be more. It may also be enough to push your electricity use up to a more expensive tier.
Still, as you note, that isn’t much. A more crucial point is that residential gas rates may be tiered by your utility as well.
That would still amount to only around $1.12/month in electricity. For comparison sake my home PC has a 1000 W continuous power supply and my electricity bill didn’t skyrocket when I set it up.
Natural gas is also present, you know; you don’t have to wait.
Range has always been a problem with CNG – you just don’t get as much energy out of the same volume as gasoline. That’s why it’s always been a better choice for fleet operations where vehicles run a (more or less) set distance each day and can schedule refills.
And while my knowledge of the technology is somewhat out of date, I haven’t seen a consumer-friendly refueling system that works anywhere near as quickly as a gasoline or diesel pump, which makes fueling on the go a dicey proposition.