With all this natural gas, who needs oil? | Hacker News Reader

With all this natural gas, who needs oil?

csmonitor.com

19 pointsgruseom23 comments

Single page link for those who would prefer to read the article whole instead of split up into seven parts:

http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print...

In India, a lot of the bus/taxi fleets have already converted to using CNG (Compressed Natural Gas). I was in New Delhi when this change occurred, and I must say that it did significantly reduce the pollution in the area where I lived. (However, these vehicles used to use Diesel which is a lot more polluting than petrol, so that may not be a fair comparison)

With all this renewable electricity, who needs yet another polluting fossil fuel energy source (the extraction of which, incidentally, will trash all of our aquifers)?

One thing: transportation.

Natural gas can be converted to a diesel-compatible liquid, which is much more compatible with our existing auto fuel transport and retail infrastructure. We'd just need to get the motoring public to be more accepting of diesel engines.x

Interesting enough my last car, a VW Golf GTD, doesn't seem to be offered in the USA (if I don't fail to navigate their site).

That's a Diesel powered 'GTI' (no.. not really. But according to its onboard computer it reaches 247km/h / 153.5 mi/h), with the comfort of a middle class family vehicle. I won't even start listing even more expensive options (Audi is a favorite brand of mine, but lots of Asian brands are interesting as well). Why _not_ a Diesel? Environmental reasons (might be good/make sense) or performance (stupid)?

For years Diesel vehicles looked and smelled much dirtier in the US due to the high sulfur and particulate content of that fuel here. It's going to take some time and effort to rehabilitate their image.

AFAIK, by the time we'd be able to convert our whole auto infrastructure to be based around natural gas, we'd only have a couple of decades left before it was just as gone as the oil. I've heard proponents boast that there's enough of the stuff to last us a hundred years at our current consumption — but isn't the whole idea to radically increase our consumption? We easily have room to double or triple it. If this catches on, it seems likely I will have been alive to see both the beginning and the end of natural gas.

Other countries might use the fracking process to produce more gas that you can import.

Natural gas is great, useful for generating electricity, heating, maybe powering cars, making plastic, etc. So why are we (the US) exporting it? It seems incredibly shortsighted. Once we've exhausted our domestic supply we'll be right back in the same mess we are currently in with oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_ga...

Why not export it? If I have something to sell, I don't care if the guy who gives me the money lives across the street or across the border. Why would you discriminate one human against the other here?

A group of students at my school are working on a high efficiency vehicle. They currently get 733 miles per gallon of gasoline. They are working towards an upcoming competition, where the winner usually gets around 2000 miles per gallon. These are vehicles which hold a driver. Alternatives just aren't anywhere near that efficient yet, and so it's difficult to provide compelling reasons to switch.

How does milage fare when you factor in the weight additions and structural design changes necessary to make a vehicle street legal in the U.S.?

Not sure what you're talking about.

My father drives a Honda Civic GX (the only car factory built to run on CNG available to the general public).

The car gets slightly more mileage on a tank of CNG than a similar car gets on a tank of petrol (although this is a difficult comparison to make due to the differences in fuel, storage, tank size, etc.).

Point is, it goes just as far and it's much cheaper.

I don't understand your argument that these vehicles are somehow less efficient than their counterparts.

Honda Civic GX (the only car factory built to run on CNG available to the general public)

Point is ... it's much cheaper.

I wonder if these two things might be related?

Cool - reducing the amount of fuel needed is great.

That said - it seems Wolfram|Alpha is translating your buddies current result to roundabout 3l/100km (per 100km is the mpg here) and.. We have that. In a car that runs on public roads (VW Lupo in this case), today. Yes, we need to push it further. But I'm not sure how you could call a bare-bone (I guess?) research vehicle interesting and special if it just reaches the efficiency of a street-legal car...

I think you slipped a decimal point. 3l/100km is ~78mpg.

You're off by a factor of ten. According to Google (http://goo.gl/5fEVp), 733 mpg is .32 L/100k.

Regardless of whether we have a 90 or 100 year supply of natural gas, it's just bloody foolish to waste it as an oil substitute for transportation. It won't solve the ultimate energy problem, it's a 50 year band-aid at best, and "Mr. Hydrogen economy" T. Boone Pickens is involved (so you ought to know something isn't quite right).

CNG? You're betting on a loser.

On the flip side, it gives renewable energy 100 more years to finally develop a cost-effective solution.

No, if I've seen anything about civilization it's that a crisis averted is quickly forgotten. We'll have precisely the same 15 years to solve the problem, but we won't have the benefit of fuel for heat.

They are drilling in my backyard right now for natural gas.

It's a shame that the national debate on energy has turned into oil vs. solar and wind. The President's idea of energy policy is to go after oil speculators, as if they really control oil prices. They're no OPEC. Conveniently, it distracts from the failures of so many "green" energy companies, the biggest among them being Solyndra, and in an election year no less.

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