Low Natural Gas Prices Aren't Spurring Demand For NGVs
Even with gasoline prices reaching higher and higher, and natural gas prices at decade lows, consumers are doing as little as possible to adopt natural gas vehicles. As investment blog Seeking Alpha found out, the answer isn’t so complex.
The issue is of course, a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Looking at fleet customers as an example, a firm called PLS Logistics published a white paper on natural gas vehicles (specifically, LNG, or liquefied natural gas, commonly used in commercial applications like trucking). The biggest stumbling block by far was the lack of infrastructure available for fueling NGVs. Even in the face of substantial awareness about NGVs, as well as optimism that they will be adopted in the future in some capacity, literally no one is planning on purchasing NGVs in the next 12 months.
One interesting takeaway is that a quarter of respondents thought that there was zero price difference between diesel and natural gas. Natural gas is about $1.50 per diesel equivalent gallon (the unit used by PLS to measure an equivalent quantity of natural gas). Good news for NGVs comes in the form of a GE-backed project to build 250 filling stations for both CNG and LNG fuels – though as Seeking Alpha notes, demand for NGVs may be affected as much by low natural gas prices as high gasoline prices.
Comments
Join the conversation
Well I looked into this myself. And the problems are as follows: 1. There aren't any CNG/LNG vehicles available that I actually want to drive. Sure I could probably find a Honda Civic GX... but all those are automatic. And the trucks on those, which are not that big to begin with, are made even smaller with the CNG tank. And forget about having fold down rear seats. 2. Few refueling stations. There just aren't many of them around. There used to be until a couple of years ago... but then Shell closed them down. The alternative is a home fueling system... which costs around $5000. And the tanks on those have to be replaced at a cost of $$$$ every 10 years too! Plus I think the system also needs to be inspected annually which costs $$$. 3. You don't save that much money when you factor in that the tanks will have to be replaced at the 10 year mark and the fact that CNG vehicles cost more to buy. 4. Driving range... basically you get a driving range that isn't all that great. And if it's a pure CNG vehicle, once you run out, you'll have to get it towed. At least with a Nissan Leaf, all you need is a 120V outlet and you can get going again eventually. 5. This has been done before in the late 1990s to early 2000s. And all the people that did, got screwed over when NG pricest went through the roof in the mid 2000s. Now they're saying that there's a huge excess supply of natural gas... but that's what was said in the mid 1990s. People just don't want to get burned again. Natural gas is a great fuel for heat, cooking, a dryer or power generation. But using it in a car? Not so great in reality.
NG is great stuff. It is cheap and burns clean. But, it is not ideal for moving vehicles, because it is bulky, or cryogenic. In either event is it is more difficult to handle and has greater safety risk than liquid hydrocarbons. Fortunately, the chemical transformation of NG into higher order alkanes that can be used as liquid fuels is fairly straight forward. The real problem is political as anybody who wanted open a plant to do that would face a fire storm of opposition from "environmentalists" and the EPA.
If they only built a stripped down, hatchback NGV vehicle with a manual tranny...
My Grandfather was a professional mechanic by trade and mechanical genious by nature, When I was a young boy in the 1970's he was teaching me a lesson in critical thinking and told me about a story about a device which he had learned about a long time before I was born that when bolted to the top of a regular gasoline engine would convert water to hydrogen and oxygen that the engine could use as a fuel. He asked me if this device was created why was petroleum products were in such short supply "which for those of you who dont rememeber,it was at the time" I had no idea, he told me that this device and the idea of how it worked as well as the patent for it were purchased and destroyed by several large corporations in co-ventute with each other to keep the price of petroleum products high and keep the money flowing to them and others. That is the real reason for all this nonsense today and one day America is going to wake up to this fact and the petroleum suppliers will be out of business in one day and we will all live cleaner healthier and better lives because of it.