My dear old friend and confidant Mlle Jenny
opines that there is a push to get more Natural gas vehicles in her neck of the woods. As Ed writes in the post linked below, the T Boone Pickens crowd is trying to make this a reality as well.
Now, I know about a half dozen people who still drive Molotov Carktails; cars whose gas caps have disapeared and been replaced by wads of red rag, which of course get soaked with gasoline and turn into incendiary devices. If people had natural gas vehicles, I can only imagine what neglectful ownership will bring us.
Jenny thinks this might be the chlorine the gene pool needs. I find it extraordinarily difficult to disagree with her.
Well, if we go to Propane, there will not be a gas cap per se. There will be a valve that if left open could provide some rocket propulsion. There is not as much energy in propane, but the cost to fill is less. I think it will be a wash in the pre mile cost. If it did not cost as much as the car to switch I might have done it all ready.
Kind of ties to some high dollar infrastructure as well.
All T-Boones idea so let him pick up some of the tab.
If I remember right, mileage goes down significantly along with any power the vehicle had. And engine rebuilds are required sooner rather than later.
I know someone who worked for a while in Australia — he said a lot of the vehicles down there can run either natural gas or “petrol.” You just switch tanks and go on about your merry way and fill up with whatever you can find.
So how do they make that work for them?
We’ve had natural gas fleet vehicles here for years, of course — for example, the transit system here runs their buses on it — I think Staples or Office Depot runs their fleet on natural gas, I’ve seen it on their trucks. Of course they have refueling facilities at fleet management. A bit harder to do when you’re Joe Average looking for a station to refuel.
There’s an increasing push towards E85 here as well but people are resistant to it — nobody likes replacing fuel pumps and lines and etc. It is available for sale at a few stations in my area but mostly the distributors claim nobody much wants it.
A rising crime wave here involves thefts of used cooking oil from Waffle Houses and the like, so there’s some biodiesel bandits around here too.
Jenny
Wait ’til the first privately owned hydrogen powered car blows. The most frequent words on ABCNNBCBS, et. al. will be “Oh the humanity!” as we watch the Hindenburg go down every 5 minutes.
I’ve no doubt some personal injury lawyer (I’m looking at you John Edwards) already has the forms and footage on file just waiting to fill in date and car manufacturer.
Since fleets owned by govts. are not libel to civil suites that’s the only place you’ll see H2 powered vehicles.
I’ll be running CNG/LPG in a vehicle when one of two things happens…
Someone gives me one… and I mean a nice one, or it becomes far cheaper than something I can pour in from a Jerry can.
Propane does have less BTU’s than gasoline, so less power and mileage. On the other hand, it burns cleaner most of the time, and it’s primary combustion byproduct is H2O. Cleaner engines live longer.
Still… I prefer a vehicle that doesn’t mysteriously empty it’s fuel tank overnight because of a leak too small to see.
I loved the guys in the pre-70’s pickemuptrucks with the corncob or the rag stuffed into the gas filler sitting right behind the driver’s door. Dad would often point that out as “the fuse”.
I always wanted to see one of them go up in a bang from a cigarette butt carelessly tossed out the window.
But then my Dad was driving a truck to Champaign, Illinois one time, mid-70’s as I recall, with a very dead, very dry evergreen tree in the back that he was going to dump in the trash pile at the job site he was managing there. Dad smoked, of course, till the day he died. Unfiltered Camels.
So about halfway up I-74, he happened to look in his rearview mirror and saw flames. Yes, he’d tossed a butt, and yes, it had set the tree on fire.
So he pulled over and started looking for something to cut the rope from the tree with. Which became moot when the rope burned through. Meanwhile, a semi had stopped just past him. But nobody came running up. Finally, the driver appeared and told Dad that he’d been looking for his fire extinguisher but couldn’t find it.
It was a rainy night as I recall it and sooner or later a cloudburst put the fire out, and Dad and the semi driver (who had found a fire axe) pulled the tree out of the pickup bed and left it on the side of the road.
Good times. Too bad I wasn’t with him on that trip.
Pickens has the right idea about natural gas.
Except he expects you and I and every other taxpayer to foot the bill for the infrastructure, just so he can rake in the bucks. He’s not willing to invest in the refueling stations until there is a market, and until it becomes as simple as filling your tank with gasoline or diesel, there will be few cars to make the market….
Until the market changes, or until someone puts forth the dollars to make refueling stations available (and I don’t mean having the feds or the state make it mandatory for every new station or anything like that) it’ll never happen.
But my issue with Pickens is that he expects the rest of us to be compliant and pay for his hopes and dreams.
And why not? There’s lots of examples of that going on in other areas all the time.
In my own home state Georgia Power is building a nuclear power plant — paid for in advance by higher rates and fees to current rate payers. The state let them do it and since Georgia Power is a monopoly not much you can do if you want electricity at your house.
City of Atlanta is overhauling their decrepit water and sewer system — by doubling the current rates of users. Don’t want to pay it? Don’t use water.
Can Pickens find someone to force us into the deal? Dunno yet but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure he has lobbyists working on it right now.
Do I agree with this sort of thing? Hell no. I am furious about it … but I seem to be in the minority. Every time I pay my power bill I get all ferklempt.
Jenny
I’ve dealt with propane powered fork trucks, the engines seem to last forever in them we had one that was built in the ’50s and I think the records said engine was rebuilt once and it was still running strong in this century. If I could have found the parts for cheaper I would have set my old diesel Ford up to allow it to burn mostly propane with diesel for the ignition source.