Seeing natural gas fueling public buses of Southern California and expanding to the commercial trucking fleets of businesses like Coca Cola, makes me wonder why this transition to cleaner natural gas power is not being applied to the general public. The recent record increases in gasoline prices across the United States are occurring when the transition to natural gas systems for consumer automobiles seems to have been put on the back burner.
While hybrid and electric car technologies are currently available and/or being developed and more extensive use of biofuels is on the horizon – the benefits, savings and emissions reductions of natural gas could be realized now. According to energy analyst Frank Curzio, natural gas is implemented as an option to the mass market cars in Europe and Asia, but not in the United States (Growth Stock Wire, 2012). Ronnie Oldham, owner of CleanFuel Conversions (located in Austin, Texas), converts cars to run on natural gas. It only took Oldham $5,000 to convert his own car to natural gas power. Natural gas costs him about $1.90 per gallon at a local natural gas filling station compared to the local gasoline stations charging twice as much per gallon for gasoline. Oldham believes in the near future the entire nation will be running on this cleaner alternative to gasoline.
Since the U.S. has tremendous natural gas reserves (much of it untapped), this can help reduce our exposure to skyrocketing gasoline and oil prices and market fluctuations created by oil market speculators, government conflicts, and accidents (refinery fires and spills), while also reducing our dependence on foreign petroleum regulated by OPEC and other foreign suppliers.
additional source: statesman.com
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I agree with you 100%. Honda does too. That’s why they have been selling the Civic GX since 2003 as an all CNG vehicle. One drawback is that the tank takes up about half of the trunk, but I recall it had pretty good driving range. It comes with the option of a refilling compressor installed in your garage (if you have natural gas line to your home). My friend in LA had one, his garage was his filling station!
In southwestern Ontario there were stations that provided natural gas for vehicles like mine that had been converted and could burn natural gas or regular gas. The supplier decided there wasn’t enough demand and closed all the outlets down. Too bad. I gave up a little hp but felt good throwing the switch to run on natural gas. One of the problems for consumers was the size and weight of the tank to hold the natural gas. Much different than tanks for propane. No problem if you had a truck like me but for passenger cars I’m not sure how that would work. I could have bought a ‘trickle compressor’ that would have let me fill up from my home gas service but that puppy cost about $7,000.