Yes, dump the propane and fill with gasoline as I’ve seen in some You Tube videos. As an aside, those can’t be real can they?
A friend of mine grew up with a car like that. One thing that he noted was that you had to be cautious when planning a long road trip because there were only a limited number of places where you could get a propane fill-up at night.
You need significant infrastructure for LPG for auto use. No point wandering over to your local hardware store if to fill your car takes all the LPG they have on hand.
Here in Oz, for a long time there was a significant use of LPG. So much so that there were some cars you could order new with LPG capability. There was a whole industry devoted to performing conversions, and most petrol (gas) stations had (many still have) an LPG capability. Usually there was one hose (with gas tight fittings) at the end of a row that would deliver LPG. The station would typically have a tank the size of a truck on a stand for LPG storage.
The economics were always tight. A huge player in the economics are taxes on fuel. A government could, at a strike of a pen, tilt the economics one way or the other. At one point, every taxi here could be guaranteed to run on LPG. However there are a range of downsides. There is a big tank to take care of. That reduced storage space dramatically. Taxis mostly didn’t care, but people buying cars for all their needs might. The volumetric and mass energy density of LPG is less than normal gasoline, which is another problem. Makes cost comparisons harder too. Plus LPG for domestic use may take a different tax to that for car use. Governments get used to the taxes on fuel for cars, and they make sure they get their cut.
Initially conversion of a car to run on LPG was easy. You just run it into a glorified carburettor. Indeed many cars were dual fuel, able to swap back to gasoline at the flick of a switch. But as cars became more and more sophisticated, and emission regulations became tighter, it was hard for LPG to keep up. You won’t be performing the many-fold modern tricks like stratified ignition with LPG. Still plenty of older cars running on LPG here, but it is fast dying. Taxis went hybrid years ago. That is a bigger winner for them (and the stop start of city traffic fits the use case for hybrids well).
I have never seen 95% methane in Natural Gas at a wellhead and I have seen a lot of them. Coming out of the well, in the US, Natural gas is 60-80% methane. Natural Gas Composition and Specifications | FSC 432: Petroleum Refining See table 12.3
Some other fun facts :
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The US is the world’s largest producer of Helium. Helium shows up anywhere from a fraction of a percent to a few percent in Natural gas (radioactive decay). Helium is needed in MRI machines and there is a huge Helium shortage. Helium extraction is getting more and more attention for natural gas.
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Methane (C1) (Natural Gas) and Propane (C3); both allow a bit of C2 (Ethane). C2 (Ethane) is also the feedstock for Ethane crackers in the gulf cost area which make ethylene and subsequently plastics. Depending on demand and prices, a gas processing plant can direct the Ethane into Natural Gas, Propane or an Ethane stream.
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After cleaning up and processing, gas is again stored back underground :
https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/storage/basics/images/fig1undergroundstorage.png
Thanks for the detailed answer Francis_Vaughan. Sounds like Australia tried to move toward LPG but has since back away from it due to the issues you highlighted. It makes perfect sense. It was a national experiment that didn’t quite work as well as everyone thought it would.
Currently, LPG in the US is $2.69 a US gallon, compared to unleaded gas which is $3.69 a US gallon. Only a dollar difference which wouldn’t justify switching to LPG to save money. Diesel, OTOH, is at $5.26 a US gallon which is fueling (no pun intended) inflation. Almost everything we buy moves by truck at some point in the US. I remember when diesel was cheaper than regular gas back in the day and companies started selling diesel cars here (e.g. Oldsmobile and Mercedes). Is the relative high cost of diesel due to supply and demand pressure, or something else? I always thought diesel was less refined than unleaded gas which would make it cheaper to produce, but that may be way off the mark.
The primary cause of high diesel prices in the last few months is Russia. US used to import distillate (diesel and a few other products) from Russia that was stopped.
There are secondary reasons too which are the closure of smaller oil refineries, the seasonal demand of diesel from agriculture, etc. The major refineries in the US are not geared for shifting production from gasoline to diesel (they can maybe move about 5% of production).
Thanks, that makes sense. Sorry for the continued hijack of a perfectly good thread.
Diesel has been higher per gallon than gasoline for decades, long before the Russian sanctions. I recall a couple years ago there was a brief period – a couple months? – where it was cheaper by a half dollar or so, but it soon reverted back to normal
@am77494 I forget where I saw that claim that NG is 95% (more or less) at the wellhead but I can’t find it now. Reading up, it appears processing NG involves a lot more than just ridding it of the sulfur components. I bow to your eperience.