Is Natural Gas practical to fuel cars? I understand the need to change how engines are built, but I’m wondering if using NG is a practical alternative to petroleum.
Google “cng car kit” for all the info you need. Compressed natural gas (cng) vehicles usually have less range than gasoline or diesel fueled ones due to natural gas having lower energy per mass and not being able to carry as much fuel by mass due to it being a gas instead of a liquid. Other than that, it works fine and has been used for years.
The main problem is that after adjusting for energy density, CNG hasn’t been consistently cheaper than gasoline. While CNG-only cars are simple and cheap, multi-fuel cars are complicated and expensive. So basically, not many people are willing to bet that CNG is going to remain cheap enough relative to petroleum to bet on it for the lifetime of a vehicle. That may change if the current low prices persist, particularly for fleet users who have much shorter vehicle “lifetimes” than you or I.
Worth mentioning: LPG/propane is commonly used to fuel cars in Australia. It works with most petrol engines, just the fuel system needs to be altered. It’s cost effective in some circumstances.
Yes, all major car makers already make natural gas powered vehicles typically for use iin select countries. They are not at all common in the U.S. but that is not because of a science problem or an engineering problem. Those are already solved. The problem is simply because of logistics. The business model hasn’t caught up yet for U.S. car manufactures to build natural gas powered cars because the filling stations aren’t inplace yet. However, there are already thousands of filling stations already built mainly to serve fleet trucking with much more to come in the next few years.
The U.S. is sitting on all the energy it needs for the next 200 years at minimum through known natural gas reserves even while exporting it to countries like China. This is a fairly recent development in the last 5 years and has shaken world-wide energy markets and also made the dire predictions about peak-oil completely irrelevant.
Expect to see natural gas powered vehicles on the consumer market in the next three years with widespread adoption in the next ten years mainly through natural gas/electric hybrids. Doing so will get the U.S. largely out of the Middle Eastern crude oil market and make us energy independent.
Business, government shifting to natural gas vehicles
Monday, September 24, 2012
*”CLEVELAND, OH - The frenzy over shale gas deep under Ohio and other states has the makings of a different kind of rush on the nation’s highways.
Businesses, cities, metropolitan transit systems and even school districts across the nation are edging toward a switch from diesel and gasoline to natural gas. …”*
There’s a fair number of transit districts using CNG to fuel buses, and they often use the adspeak term “Clean Natural Gas.” Also, some cities are introducing CNG-fueled taxis.
Released today, there’s a news bit about Canadian National Railroad investigating CNG for powering locomotives. As mentioned above, the energy density is a bit of a problem, judging by the full-sized tank car that carries the fuel. Normally, those locos carry their own fuel in the tanks between the wheels.
A natural gas version of the Honda Civic has been available for something like 10 years. Obviously, production is very limited, and you can’t just go to a Honda dealer and drive one off the lot, but they are available to consumers. You can fuel at home.
CNG =! LPG
CNG requires big and heavy gas cylinders to withstand the high pressure of the gasses. Converting a passenger car to CNG isn’t practical; the cylinders will add too much weight and eat up occupant space. It has been fitted on buses and trucks though.
LPG on the other hand is the same stuff you buy in bottles for your barbecue. The LPG container can be installed in the trunk or there are some donought shaped tanks that fit in the spare wheel well.
I had a family saloon running CNG for years in NZ. Boot space was restricted by the tank, and you had to fill pretty regularly, but it was cheaper to run (NZ had lots of cheap Natural Gas back then). I understand that the CNG network is pretty restricted now, and CNG has basically collapsed.
Si
The Honda Civic GX that was mentioned above disagrees with you; it uses CNG to run. There have been many other passenger cars that use CNG available in other parts of the world as well.
It will be interesting to see how natural gas cars vs electric & plug-in hybrid cars play out in the US over next 15-20 years or so. The plug-in cars have a head start, with at least seven (Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus EV, Chevy Volt, Fisker Karma, Tesla Model S, Mitsubishi iMiev, Toyota Plug-in Prius) on sale in US, with several others in the pipeline; meanwhile the Civic GX is the only natural gas car available for sale in the US, though several pickups will be adding it as on option soon.
Personally, I think battery tech will win out for passenger cars, while natural gas will see lot more use in heavier vehicles, at least over the next 15-20 years. Batteries keep getting cheaper & better, while CNG is a mature technology without much room for improvement; so the price difference between the two should be steadily dropping. Tesla, for example, has gone from selling a 2-seat sports car with a 56 kw-hr battery for $110k + in 2008 to selling a 7 seat hatchback with a 85 kw-hr battery, starting at $78k before any tax rebates, that are rolling off the assembly line right now. Batteries probably won’t get cheap enough in this time frame to be practical for larger vehicles, and since those are mostly owned by fleet users, having a large, central refueling station isn’t a big deal.
Electrical infrastructure is also better developed than natural gas infrastructure; everyone who can afford a new car has electricity at home, while not everyone has natural gas piped in. Compressing natural gas at home takes about as long to fuel a car as does recharging it with electricity, and the compressor costs about twice as much installed as a home fast charger. And cheap people can just plug in an electric vehicle to a standard 110v line and still get 30-40 miles worth of range overnight. And putting in a network of charging stations to cover major highways and interstates will probably be a lot cheaper than putting in a sufficient number of natural gas fueling stations, since more cars will need to use fueling stations, do to the natural gas coverage issue mentioned above.
I owned for a couple years a 1995 Ford Crown Vic that had been converted over to CNG. The two biggest drawbacks to the car was the trunk was basically useless, 80% of it was taken up by the tank and it had a limited range, less than 200 miles on a tank. The upside was fewer oil changes, CNG burns a lot cleaner that gasoline and the oil would still look new after 5000 miles. The tank in the car wasn’t all that heavy, I had to remove it once and was able to easily lift it out of the trunk by myself. It weighed maybe 100 pounds, probably less.
The big play for CNG is in commercial vehicles, where space and refueling are less of an issue. However, there is ongoing work to develop conformable tanks and low cost compressors to make CNG more attractive for passenger vehicles on the short term.
That isn’t just ad puffery. Natural gas (which is mostly methane) has the lowest CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions per energy of any fossil fuel, and also tends to produce lower amounts of other pollutants (though that depends on the technology and on the purity of the fuel).
Actually, it is when you take into account leaks in the system; methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2; in fact, studies suggest that switching to all natural gas could actually worsen the effects (never mind that it still produces CO2 when burned). And that was compared to coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, so comparing it to oil make sit look even worse:
As for the actual leakages?
The main advantages then would be the reduction in other pollutants, but as far as climate change goes (a much bigger problem), it isn’t any better.
About 99.9% of all industrial forklifts (large and small) are run on propane. A large number are battery/electric but I’ve never seen one that used gasoline. This is mainly a refueling & fuel storage issue as tanks of propane are cheaper, easier, and generally safer to store on site than an underground gasoline tank. Plus swapping an empty tank with a full one is also easier, faster, and safer than refilling it with liquid fuel.
And I also think that propane burns cleaner with less Carbon Monoxide emitted, which is important as the majority of forklifts operate partially or often totally indoors.
Huh, I didn’t realize that natural gas leakage was that big an issue. Yes, I can see that that could be a major problem, then.
Would it be practical to use natural gas to power small electric plants dedicated to charging batteries for electric cars?
It’s not practical to dedicate power plants to anything. All forms of usage are uneven, but the more things you connect together on the same grid, the less uneven the whole grid is. An increase in the number of electric cars might require more generating infrastructure, and some of those new generators might be gas-powered, but the energy from those new plants would also be lighting bulbs, running air conditioners, and doing all the other things electricity does.
NETL has a report out that says the grid isn’t ready for widespread EV use, but I can’t find the darn thing. Plus there are some materials issues; lithium and lanthanides are not readily available domestically. That said, EV technology is improving, and ultimately burning a hydrocarbon in a power plant is better than in an ICE in your car.