Natural Gas use in Transportation

I understand that in some markets, Honda sells a special Civic that runs on natural gas. You can refill at natural gas refuelling stations or have a small refueling station put into your home

 

Do we really want to have the government spending money on non-sustainable energy solutions? I'd rather have them buy electric vehicles.

 

check your facts.
I've read we now import NG from Canada and they are running low. They are building 3 large LNG tanker ports to start importing LNG.
The price in NG for home use has jumper 20%+ in AZ. Friends that have it wer shocked. It happened 2 years in a row.

Utilities have passed on NG cost increases as fuel adjustment charges. It is a very serious problem.

When you burn NG in a vehicles 80% or more is wasted in friction and heat just like gasoline is. The Internal Combustion Engine ICE is very inefficient.
If you burn NG in a combines cycle power plants it's 70-80% EFFICIENT just the opposite on burning it in a vehicle !

Maybe you could use NG in a hybrid as Toyota showed with a hybrid Camry NG vehicle. At least then it's not as wastful as burning it in a regular vehicle.

WIND is very intermittent, it usually blows at bnight when the grid already has excess that gets wasted. To add a lot more WIND . Plug-in vehicles like Hybrid plug-ins, pre electrics like the Tesla, eBoc etc couls store the wind energy anytime and sell back during peak needs in the middle of the day.

 

I get my energy facts from non-political energy experts, not talk radio. You need to do the same. Yes, I clicked KGO and that explained everything.....about the strange claim of 200 years of natural gas, nuclear energy, etc.

We definitly will have liquid gas last the length of both our lives, so why would do you care about the difference between 100 years and 200 years?

 

Hi All,

I agree with Jstack regarding NG use in transportation. There is no compelling reason to use it, and a HELL OF A BIG REASON NOT TO. Using NG in cars is just a shell game. Pay less for car fuel, pay more for heating and electricity. Atcually, as Jstack pointed out, its worse than that. Its pay less to enable a SUV on-the-road economy, and a ghetto houshold economy, as home energy prices would double. Or in other words, the shell gamer starts with two peas, and when the final reveal is done, there is only one pea left!

As far as vehicle storage of Wind energy, I am not convinced its pratical. Because cars are not typically connected to the grid when the grid neads energy. And additionally, right after that time, people need the energy to drive home. So, pulling the energy out of their cars at that time is not going to go over well.

When Wind and Solar electrical energy gets to be nearly as large as fuel fired sources, there will need to be some sort of storage. And that storage most likely be power-company owned, not vehicle user owned. Large battery banks is one such method. Other methods have been talked about - like pumping water up-hill back behind the dam. This would require a storage basin at the base of the dam, rather than just letting all the water run down stream in a narrow channel.

The large battery bank concept would aid the electrification of the automobile by providing a large production volume. Car companies would be wise to promote this to diversify their proffit sources.

 

Totally agree. Probably 2/3 of the country depends on NG for heating, adding demand from transportation will only increase heating costs. Making SUVs cheaper by substituting one fossil fuel for another is not sustainable. NG is also the best back up for solar and wind electrical production. A NG electric plant can ramp up or down much quicker and more efficiently than coal or nuclear.

Agree again, do not see large scale vehicle storage for the above reasons. The best way to incorporate EVs into our current grid system is to adopt time-of-day pricing that would result in using excess night time capacity to charge EVs.

Substituting one fossil fuel for another is a very short term, non sustainable solution. Let's look at EVs and non-corn, low water demand ethanol. Switchgrass, hemp, caster beans and algae are all possible ethanol sources that are sustainable.

Government and institutional fleets are perfect candidates for conversion to EVs. Mostly low miles per day, lots of stop and go driving, rarely used at night so they can be recharged at lower rates,
can be basic stripped down models built in large numbers, rarely fully loaded. Think about urban mail delivery, building inspectors, meter readers, etc, etc. Large scale government purchases of EVs could create the demand that would push battery development and production to the critical mass.

If the government really wanted to think out side the box on transportation it could buy or "liberate" the battery technology that worked for the EV1 and Toyota RAVEV that is now held by an oil company. Just tell the Republicans we did it for "national secuity" reasons.

 

NG is not THE answer, but it is better than oil.
EVs are a better answer as they can use electricity produced with coal, NG, nukes, wind, solar, hydro or what ever other generation method works best.
Most likely NG will find some areas it works better than electricity. And electricity will find many areas it works better than NG. But again, both work better than oil.

 

You hunch on this topic is not shared by many. Peak demand shaving would only take a few percent from any one vehicle. A truly smart grid and intelligently managed network would manage peak demand without any noticeable difference to drivers. And the afternoon/early evening peak occurs because people have arrived home from their commute and start turning things on. Also during the hottest parts of the day when AC power is highest, cars are largely parked. I don't see a problem with this at all.

 

Modern Combined Heat and Power - CHP - or "cogeneration" turbine power plants can achieve remarkable efficiency, the 70-80% you quoted.

So, are we better off using NG to make relatively clean electricity, to power EV's, or are we better off using NG to directly power the transportation fleet?

We are still better off - in terms of long-term cost and efficiency - to use NG to generate electricity in CHP power plants

BTW we are also using a surprising amount of NG to run the tar sands of ALberta.

The Oil Drum | Oh, Canada! -- Natural Gas and the Future of Tar Sands Production

Annual Energy Outlook with Projections to 2025-Issues in Focus - Natural Gas Consumption in Canadian Oil Sands Production

Potentially, the entire output of the Mackenzie Valley gas field would be used just to run the tar sands

Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 2

If instead they were to build a nuclear power plant just to run the tar sands, we would see the true costs of tar sands oil. I personally support nuclear power to run the tar sands, as the NG can be used far more effectively for home heating and power generation

 

Hmm. Several thoughts, some of which I can print.
You can take the boy out of the army, but you can't take the army out of the boy.
Do you use a chainswaw on your butter every morning?

And the real question: Thinking back to earlier conversations about water filtration, how would we go about restoring water, soil, and air after nuclear and petrochemical contamination?

 

No, you don't get it

The reason why I want to see a nuclear power plant built to run the tar sands is cost: it would probably cost $12 billion to build such a facility, not to mention +10 years

That cost would be so enormous, it would not be done, and the tar sands would close. Get it? The TRUE COST of the tar sands could no longer be hidden. Not to mention the huge decade long time delay

Instead, we have the generous Canadian taxpayer subsidizing the use of a major natural gas field - the Mackenzie Valley field - just to run the tar sands. Much like how the generous Canadian taxpayer subsidizes the Hibernia field for a large American oil company

The Mackenzie Valley would be put to far better use heating our homes. Natural Gas is also an essential component of many modern component chemicals

The issue about wastewate and potable water treatment is pretty close to home for me. I have argued for a long time about impacted soils and water, the need for remediation, and the COST for remediation. Nobody gives one s***, certainly not grade school dropout hillbilly local politicians

Yet the average dumbass is *far* more interested in Hockey Night In Canada, Idol, Survivor, and that new skating rink that had the ribbon cutting last week

In the US alone, you could *easily* spend the entire TARP fund just on upgrading all the potable water and wastewater treament plants and distribution piping. Ditto for the various proposed bailouts that our Liberal-Conservative coalition government here have rammed through

So as an engineer, I'm between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, political action groups like Greenpeace and others like to claim that chlorination is "bad" for water. I always try to keep an open mind, "ok propose a much safer option that is just as effective"

They have a strong arguement in developing countries, folks are terrified of chlorinating water. So when it causes a disease outbreak like Cholera in Peru in 1991, suddenly it's the fault of the engineer for not making water "safe"

Ok. So how the f*** do I make water "safe?" Magic?

Do I deny the existence of disinfection byproducts? Absolutely not! They exist primarily due to the presence of organics when disinfection is started

As I clearly stated in the water thread - perhaps not clearly enough if this is evidence - the best way to eliminate disinfection byproducts is to EFFECTIVELY FILTER ORGANICS OUT BEFORE DISINFECTION

However, that is a *very* expensive process, and many older potable water plants are incapable of doing so. They quite literally have to bleach the s*** out of the water.

A good combination of far more effective and NATURAL coagulation/flocculation and natural filtration (Membrane, anthracite, sand) will result in much LOWER need for harsh disinfection. You still need to maintain RESIDUAL chlorine products to ensure the safety of the distribution network, end to end, but that residual could be kept far lower

Right now, we have to maintain much higher residuals just to make up for an ancient and leaky infrastructure. Let's not forget the disinfection byproducts from having excess organics in the water to begin with

How about alternative disinfection? I covered that in the water thread. Currently, they all offer various disinfection byproducts. Here is the catch though: those alternative disinfection byproducts are currently NOT regulated, even though they are JUST AS DANGEROUS as chlorination byproducts

As a culture and a society, we appear to have a lot of money to piss away on narcotics, professional sports, and bailing out large companies that caused their own bullshit problems. Somebody like me comes along and suggests we build new wastewater and potable water treatment plants that not only work much more efficiently, but much more safely, nobody listens

Anyhoo this is why I really no longer give one s*** about our infrastructure. Disease outbreak? Who cares? As long as the sheep are far more willing to pay a jock $10 million a year, it shows where their priorities are.

 

Sorry, Jay. I misinterpreted what you were saying. I thought for a stupid second you actually did want to see nuclear powered oil extraction, but what you really want is for people to understand the cost. I should have known better - I take back my comments about armies and chainsaws.

"Full cost" is something I've been advocating for a long time, vainly explaining the technical accounting term 'externality'. Raw materials and public goods like clean water, air, and soil are considered to be 'outside' the economic system, and given an economic value of zero. The values may be difficult to quantify, but they are certainly not 'nothing'. They're everything, really. In the long run, the environment IS the economy.

We have no idea what anything truly costs us, because the all-too-real costs of pollution, for one, are not reflected in the purchase price. Petrochemicals, for example, should be priced to recover all the byproducts of combustion from the atmosphere, among other things, and to restore the ocean after oil spills. The environment should 'be made whole', to borrow a legal-ish term. But no, that astronomical sum for a litre of gas would be seen as 'artificial' and 'anti-business'. Instead of facing reality, we directly subsidise oil exploration and extraction in many ways, and ignore the true costs. They're not zero at all, they're infinite. It's an accounting error to make Enron look like petty cash.

In some ways it's everyone's fault, because we're all guilty, and in other ways it isn't anyone's fault, because we don't have complete information to make informed purchasing decisions. But yeah, we'd far rather be entertained than think. I get it.

 

And I'm sorry about my rant too. Issues like this hit very close to home for me, as it seems to uncurl my short and curlies whenever I think about projects in my past where I came up against an Old Boys Club of local politics

It tends to get me very teste (Get it? "Teste" Yuk yuk yuk baaaaaa) when I see on the boob tube some politician smiling it up for the cameras as the ribbon gets cut on a new multi use sporting arena, they have plenty of money for that, don't they

The reason why we have the system we currently have is two-fold

First: we can very conveniently shove most of the costs (Future cleanup, cancer clusters, birth defect clusters, etc) into the future. So we can live really good in the here-and-now. Most of the individuals and corps resonsible are usually long gone before the eventual cleanup happens anyway

Two: The only way a relative handful of us can live the way we do (Eg, Canadians, Americans, and EU folks enjoy a pretty high standard of living, access to health care, etc - making up under 12% of the global population but easily consumming 2/3 of global energy production) is to make damn sure the rest of the global population is kept dirt poor, simple (Lack of education, encouragement of superstition and other belief systems), and at the edge of starvation or even lower

When you step back and consider inputs and outputs, supply and demand, etc, if every single living person had equal access to resources, nobody would be fat. That's for sure, probably healthier too

As far as Tar Sands, I noticed that Obama hasn't exactly forbidden the use of Tar Sands oil products. I also noticed that Michael Ignatieff appears to very vigorously DEFEND the tar sands

Not that I for a moment approve of that, but it was comical how Ignatieff really backstabbed Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe. Baaaaaaa

 

Somebody should edit a smilie that indicates short-and-curlies becoming uncurled. Found this at the Ottawa Citizen

Ignatieff defends oilsands

Translation: "Oil sands very bad, but very good too. Thank you for supporting the Liberal-Conservative Coalition. Please tip your waitress on the way out"

 

Rant on, my friend.

 

We *really* need a smilie of short-and-curlies uncurling. That would express paragraphs right there

 

Add more public transportation into this discussion as well.

Tom