OKC should be driving this trend - Compressed Natural Gas transportation

[hipsterdoofus]

It's only american right now, the government is making it almost impossible to discover, explore, drill for new natural gas. We are beginning to import more and more of it and the government is setting us up to be in the same position with nat gas that we are with oil today within 20 years time. A scary prospect.

Yeah...but at this point, 20 years is 20 years...i'd rather have it good for that long while they look for alternatives.

[mmonroe]

I'd like to see the cost effectiveness if half the country ran on Nat Gas and the other half on Gasoline. Let the upper classes upgrade, who can afford it, to Nat Gas, and Let the lower classes keep there gasoline cars.

This would cut costs on the price of gasoline, and raise the prices of nat gas slightly. On that thought, Chesapeake grows, they shell out more money for OKC projects, we all benefit... EH?

[andy157]

I'd like to see the cost effectiveness if half the country ran on Nat Gas and the other half on Gasoline. Let the upper classes upgrade, who can afford it, to Nat Gas, and Let the lower classes keep there gasoline cars.

This would cut costs on the price of gasoline, and raise the prices of nat gas slightly. On that thought, Chesapeake grows, they shell out more money for OKC projects, we all benefit... EH?

Brilliant!!!!!!

[mmonroe]

Brilliant!!!!!!

Thank you.

[mmonroe]

Does anyone know the Mileage on a CNG powered car?

[OUGrad05]

Yeah...but at this point, 20 years is 20 years...i'd rather have it good for that long while they look for alternatives.

Ummm...they wont look at alternatives if they have a clean cheap source of fuel...it doesn't make business sense to do so.

Nat gas is a great fuel but becoming dependant on foreign sources of nat gas is a bad move.

[OUGrad05]

Does anyone know the Mileage on a CNG powered car?

Depends completely on the car and the motor.

Nat gas is cheaper on a BTU basis so I guess you could assume something like a honda civic gets 40mpg lets say...well a gallon of typical gasoline contains roughly 125,000 BTU. And to keep the math simple lets say its 4 bucks a gallon. So it costs 4 dollars to drive your civic 40 miles and it uses 125,000 BTU's of energy.

Natural gas that we use in our homes and would use in cars is roughly 1000BTU per cubic foot or 1 million BTU per thousand cubic feet (natural gas is billed in thousand cubic foot increments). Right now the going rate is about 11.35 per thousand cubic feet. So again to keep math simple lets just round up to 12 bucks.

12 dollars per thousand cubic feet or 1 million BTU's. Take 125,000/1,000,000 and you get .125...so take .125 and multiply it times 12 dollars and you get $1.50 to go the same distance on Nat gas in a civic as you would in the equivelent gasoline car.

Now to give you an idea of what this does to natural gas demand...we currently use about 9.8 million barrels of oil per day on gasoline, so I'm going to just round that to 10 million barrels a day. The typical barrel is 42 gallons. The ratio of gasoline per gallon of oil due to additives is now about 1:1 so thats 420 million gallons of gasoline per day in this country.

420 million times 125,000 gives us 52,500,000,000,000 or 52.5 TRILLION BTU's.

Now divide the 52.5 trillion by 1000 and you come up with 52.5 BILLION cubic feet of natural gas which is almost double the US average daily demand for natural gas. A doubling in demand almost never results in a doubling of price, instead prices rise much more dramatically. Shifting to a nat gas infrastructure for transportation opens up a whole new pandora's box of problems. Supplementing it is fine, but keep in mind we heat our homes with natural gas, the nation is also getting a larger portion of its electric power from natural gas. Instead of a 200 dollar natural gas bill in february 400, 500 or 600 dollars would be a bit unbearable for most folks and thats assuming only a modest gain in demand, not a doubling of demand.