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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (24857)	6/23/2009 5:58:37 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

CNG has been around for decades. In BP Oil NZ we used to run a chain of CNG stations in the north island of New Zealand where methane was available from the Maui field and where there were pipelines to some of the country. Because cars were not designed for CNG use, they were retrofitted with tanks and other equipment, normally so they could run on either CNG or petrol [petrol for Americans is gasoline]. In 1985, I told Alan Revell, the managing director, that we should stop spending money on CNG because it was going to be uneconomic with the price of crude oil dropping. Sure enough, the CNG business disappeared. With purpose built cars, CNG would be far more economic. Retrofitting cost $1000s and vehicle performance was weak, range was short, prices were not all that cheap making it economic for taxis and other high mileage vehicles, but not for everyone. Liquefied methane would be better, but it's much harder to manage than blowing gas around. Methane is one step off hydrogen which would be the ultimate. Maybe Obama hopes that with lots of photovoltaics, getting hydrogen from water would be economic. I have no idea why he favours windmills and photovoltaics. Perhaps to replace grid electricity is the idea rather than replacing transport fuels and thereby save the world from CO2 which isn't a problem anyway, but he doesn't know that yet. Not only is CO2 not a problem, it is a solution = plants need more of it than is naturally available. Plants have their own tragedy of the commons - all the chlorophyll crowd have stripped the atmosphere of all but the last vestiges of CO2. There is a looming food shortage for people. It's not just looming, but is here for swarms. Burning food as biofuel is ridiculous, if not a crime against humanity. Having more CO2 in the air increases crop yields. CO2 is the foundation of life. It's ridiculous that Greenies call the very foundation of life a pollutant. CNG works just fine as a vehicle fuel. It's also better than petrol or diesel for the engines because it's completely clean, leaving the combustion chamber clean as a whistle, and not making the lubricant dirty [though it still suffers nitration, oxidation and polymerizes so needs changing - some people make the mistake of checking their oil, seeing the oil looks clean and not changing it, but the acids are building up and goodbye engine] Sometimes people think oil prices can go very high, but they can't. There is no shortage of energy. The cosmos is made of the stuff. All that matters is the cost of getting one form or other into the place we want. If one form gets too expensive, we'll just use something else. "Too expensive" means about $40 a barrel equivalent, or maybe even as low as $20 though with all the production of $trillions of money dilution, it's hard to know. CNG for around town, in purpose designed city cars, where methane is piped, is probably the best fuel now. A Prius by comparison is hideously expensive with two motor types and a very expensive battery. The carbon footprint of a Prius is huge by comparison [especially if the upstream costs of producing the battery are counted]. From a safety point of view, CNG is good. The tanks have to be so strong that it would take an rpg or armour piercing bullet to smash into them to make them leak. A decompression valve can stop the flow if the pipes are ripped off. If they do get a hole because somebody shoots it, which I guess is sure to happen in the USA, then it's no worry anyway. The gas will just blow out and blow away in seconds. If the gas does ignite, it's still no worry because it will just make a jet of flame and provided people don't stand in the way of the flames, which people tend not to do, then it'll just burn itself out in a big jet of flame. That would of course ignite a vehicle so it would not pay to be trapped in it just as a petrol fire tends to ignite the vehicle. Gas is better than petrol because it doesn't spill, it just blows away, so if there's no ignition source immediately, there's no flame. An rpg would be a good ignition source. One mistaken idea people have is that the tank blows up like a bomb. That can't happen because there's no oxygen inside the tank. It can only burn when it is outside the tank, mixing with air. The dopey Islamic Jihad doctors in England who tried to blow up LPG tanks in London and after trying to crash into an airport terminal learned that the hard way. All they got for their trouble was jets of flame which made them personally very hot [fatally so in one case] causing little other damage. There are probably enough CNG tanks in vehicles now to have good data on their safety. My guess is that they are very safe. The government doesn't have to do anything to make CNG a success, just get out of the way and equalize taxes [or even give preference to CNG as an environmentally preferable fuel if CO2 is considered a worry]. Stop subsidizing food to fuel programmes too [aka biofuels] which is a crime against humanity when people are starving. If there's a buck in it, people will soon invest in CNG refueling, vehicles, pipelines, delivery trucks [some CNG was distributed by trucks in NZ to places with no pipeline]. Mqurice [Since I already wrote it, I might as well put it here too since it's more environmental than political - first written in Politics for Pros stream]