A story about small autos that use natural gas as a fuel hit the Washington Post today. From what I've gather the natural gas autos are not a complete package.
1) The natural gas is stored in a compressed form in a heavy duty fuel tank. Still, the fuel tank is huge and take up so much space there is no room for a car trunk. 2) Even with a large heavy duty fuel tank, the natural gas vehicle only hold the equivalent of 5 to 6 gallon of gas, which limits the range of the vehicle to around 180 miles. This is not good for long trips, especially when there are few service stations that offer natural gas fuel, which mean the next nearest station could be a long distance away. 3) As per 2 above, there are few service station that carry natural gas. 4) The natural gas vehicle uses a combustion engine. I suppose this would limit the compression ratio to something like 8 to 1 or 9 to 1, whereas the diesel has a compression ration of 19 to 1 to 25 to 1. The diesel would provide better performance with greater torque, and still give better miles per gallon. Of setting the better mileage per gallon in the diesel is a cheaper cost for an equivalent gallon of natural gas. 5) Natural gas is not a renewable energy. Once it is burned, it is gone forever. 6) Natural gas prices have been under demand side economic pressure for some time now, which has increased cost to the end users, and this trend is likely to continue. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/25/AR2008082502546.html?wpisrc=newsletter or http://tinyurl.com/6gqhdw Regards, LelandJ _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
