I was involved in the government tests of LNG in the early 70s, as the 11th Naval District representative in the experiment. I was the Air Pollution Officer for the District, and while my primary concern was ships “Blowing Stacks” to rid themselves of the carbon collected from fuel combustion, I was also looking into new means of reducing carbon buildup.
It was a grand experiment, involving the General Service Administration, the Navy, and San Diego Gas and Electric and it certainly demonstrated the successful use of Liquefied Natural Gas.
it has great potential in often driven vehicles, but as the singed eyebrows of the drivers demonstrated, one would need to be a non-smoker. The vacuum bottles of the gas held at minus 240 degrees leaked a percent or two a day into the cab of the car.
The other method of using natural gas is CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) which is held under pressure — in effect, a “bomb” in your trunk. (Not in mine, unless the technology is a whole lot better than it was. It probably is, everything else is better.) Personally, I prefer a large Thermos bottle in my trunk to a large pressurized container.
(You might think the gas used for picnic cooking — Propane — might be better used as a fuel, but that gas is heavier than air, so when it leaks it does not evaporate and disperse, it pools. concentrates, and becomes far more dangerous. That is why Propane trucks are usually banned from using tunnels on the East Coast.)
The potential of paying as little as a dollar (or two) for an equivalent gallon of gasoline is very enticing. For fleet vehicles this is particularly exciting. liquefied natural gas loss through evaporation is so high that it is most useful for often-used fleet vehicles.
The recent technological advances in unlocking vast pools of natural gas in the US has unleashed renewed interest, but the main problem is still refueling. There are currently 160,000 gasoline stations nationwide, and only 600 natural gas refueling stations. Here in San Diego in the 70s we only had two refueling stations, fine for an experiment but little else.
Of course natural gas is explosive, as the nightly news reports tell us regularly, but there is little (including dynamite) that is as dangerous as gasoline. We have successfully conquered the explosive nature of gasoline, and we can do it with natural gas as well.
T. Boone Pickens is building a chain of liquefied stations for long-haul truckers, and a compressed natural gas company has joined with GE and Whirlpool to do the same for the compressed version.
Only Honda currently sells a natural gas fueled car, and it sells only a couple of thousand a year, but I recall that conversion kits for gasoline powered cars were relatively cheap, although there was about a 10% loss of horsepower as a penalty. Today’s cars have so much extra horsepower that can never be legally used that a penalty of 10% will be unfelt.
That is a penalty certainly worth taking for fuel at a buck! Even at two dollars until competition drives the price down, and we get the extra bonus of getting off the Middle East merry-go-round.
It is still beyond my horizon, and it will not even be regular driving fare for my children. Perhaps some alternative such as Hydrogen Fuel Cells will intervene and make natural gas obsolete, but we must continue to explore alternatives to fuel oil and derivatives.
Oil is still plentiful, worldwide, but too much of it is owned by people who do not have this nations best interest at heart. If we are still going to use the internal combustion engine (and we are), we need cheap, available alternative fuels. Natural gas fills that bill to a T, once we get re-fueling stations available.
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