Natural Gas Can Power Vehicles OR Electric Power Plants
There is nothing really new about using Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) as a vehicle fuel. It works well in internal combustion engines and it is possible to squeeze enough energy on board in a reasonable size tank at a reasonable pressure to provide gasoline or diesel equivalent range. There are modification kits available for a number of automobiles, there is at least one production automobile (Honda Civic GX) and there are a number of options for buses (Viking CNG BS-III, New Flyer C/L30LF, C/L35LF, C/L40LF, etc.) suitable for municipal fleets.
The new thing, the reason that talk about CNG is growing, is that natural gas now costs about half as much per unit energy as gasoline and has an even greater cost advantage over diesel fuel.
With new software and lean-burning regimes available, CNG powered engines have improved their fuel economy to the point where they have reached essential parity with engines powered by the sister fossil fuels of gasoline and diesel. To compare fuel cost per mile, it is not a bad approximation to compare fuel costs per BTU, (or MMBTU, or therm).
I know, there are enough different units out there to cause some confusion, but if you want to do battle with the energy suppliers, you have to learn their language. Two thumb rules worth knowing - multiply the cost of natural gas in $/MMBTU by 6 and you will find out how much an oil equivalent barrel of natural gas costs. Multiply the cost of a gallon of diesel fuel by 7 and you will find out its cost in $/MMBTU.
One of my most frequently visited web sites is Bloomberg.com: Energy Prices where you can find the market prices for a number of different fuels. There you can find daily market prices (without taxes and retail mark ups) for natural gas, gasoline and distillate fuels (heating oil and diesel fuel are essentially the same composition.) Example: today, natural gas delivered to New York City gate (a trading hub) costs $13.92, the equivalent of $83.50 per barrel when converted to oil equivalent units. Diesel fuel costs $3.92 per gallon, the equivalent of $27.50 per MMBTU. Arm yourself with this information and you can see why people in decision making positions are looking hard at CNG again.
CNG vehicles have been around for a while, have good track records for safety and cleanliness, and have a growing pool of satisfied customers. The federal government also provides some generous subsidies for both individuals and fleet purchasers. Under the Energy Policy Act of 1992, natural gas qualifies as an alternative fuel, which gives it a certain tax status by providing EPAct credits.
Throw in those incentives, a shift in the market price to significantly favor natural gas and some long term marketing efforts by coalitions that include Sierra Club, NRDC, ExxonMobil, CleanAir.org, PowerCompare.org, Natural Gas Vehicle Association and Chesapeake Energy and you may soon see a lot more of those CNG vehicles on the road.
Of course, those who know me at all know that I have difficulty producing an energy related article without bringing up nuclear power, so here is the expected plug. In recent memory, natural gas has actually been far less expensive than it is today. In 2003, for example, an MIT study about energy futures assumed that the high price case would be $4.00 per MMBTU with about a 5% annual increase.
Using that prediction, gas should cost just $5.10 per MMBTU, not $13.92. The difference is that gas is now the “go to” electricity fuel. A little more than 20% of the electricity in the US is produced by burning natural gas - the quantity of gas consumed in power plants has increased by 30% since 2000.
When we begin building and operating new nuclear power plants, which run on abundant fuel that costs just $0.50 per MMBTU (including the waste storage fee), we will free up a lot of gas and drive down its market price. That will make room for a lot of domestically powered CNG vehicles and reduce the amount of oil that we need to import. (The reason I “shouted” the word OR in the title is that every BTU of gas can only be burned once. Every bit that burns in power plants cannot be burned in vehicle engines.)
That kind of talk makes it hard for aggressive nukes like me to build coalitions with other energy suppliers who are thoroughly enjoying their current market power, but how does it sound to you?
Photo credit - DC Metro CNG bus by Rod Adams under Creative Commons. (Taken in going home traffic on June 25, 2008)
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@It makes no sense to chase around after the lowest-cost fossil fuel of the moment when ultimately all of them are non-renewable, polluting energy sources. Our time and effort are much better spent driving innovation in renewable, sustainable technologies. And no, Mr. Adams, nuclear fission is neither renewable nor sustainable. It may not be you or I, but at some point people are going to have to deal with that radioactive waste. Burying it in the ground for future generations to deal with is irresponsible.
You are absolutely right about that.
Cost Benefits Could Bring Natural Gas Vehicles To Forefront | Deliggit.com…
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I have read that the French recycle nuclear waste and get even more energy from that fuel source. That also greatly reduces the level of nuclear waste. If power companies in this country were to do the same as the French, my misgivings about nuclear power would drop substantially.
Of course I may be wrong about this.
@ Michael JC:
I fully recognize that gas prices have increased, but the comparison between their current price on a cost per unit heat basis and the current price of diesel fuel on a cost per unit heat basis is what makes gas a potentially competitive vehicle fuel.
I also proposed a partial solution to high and increasing natural gas prices - reduce natural gas consumption in power plants.
Many power turbines already run on natural gas, diesel, and on no 2 heating oil. This is one of the reasons why electric prices go up when fuel prices go up. Its called the law of conservation of energy.
I recently returned from Australia where it’s quite common to use natural gas for automobiles - and many stations sell natural gas.
For us yankees, we can’t say we want to buy gas - because the Australians assume natural gas. So you have to say petrol. By the way, gas - er, petrol, is quite expensive in Australia and New Zealand ($8/gallon) and life goes on - many people are driving.and the economies are doing well.
Natural gas is becoming more renewable all the time as we tap into free sources- Land fill gas from garbage dumps and biogas from dairies.
Most natural gas is delivered by regulated utilities, thats why its a safe bet to use clean natural gas and you can actually plug that cost into a yearly budget with no surprises.
Natural gas is also domestic, we do not import it so its disconnected from world supply problems.
We have 4 CNG vehicles at our house and fuel in our driveway with a fuelmaker, we laugh when we drive past the corner gas station, we are fueling for less than half the cost of unleaded.
maya> solutions to deal with the nuclear so-called waste exist for decades - recycle the fuel using MOX fuel in current reactors, and ultimately in LMFR breeders, MSR burners or alike. The resulting “waste” - fission fragments - need to be shielded from the environent for several hundred years only, which is a trivial engineering problem. Actually all those fission fragments are indeed rare materials with unique properties, all with many uses in industry and medicine already - but until reprocessing becomes commonplace, separating these elements is uneconomical.
Interestingly, the groups which are the loudest proponents of all kinds of recycling, are very stubborn in their opposition against nuclear fuel recycling. Perhaps because this recycling - technically the “closed nuclear cycle” - makes the nuclear power sustainable for tens of thousands of years at the very least, which is against their dogma?
ChrisB> The same recycling as done in France is under way in the US as well:
http://www.dcsmox.com/
http://www.areva-nc.com/scripts/areva-nc/publigen/content/templates/show.asp?P=7663&L=EN&SYNC=Y
and by the same French-based company Areva, indeed.
I hope your misgivings are dropping
I think it should also be added that biogas, the renewable replacement for natural gas, is one of the easiest biofuels to produce because methane, CH4, is such a simple compound compared to Ethanol (C2H5OH) or Bio-diesel (CH3OCO(CH2)12CH3).