Natural Gas? Why won't anyone talk about it?

Question

Natural Gas is plentyfull and its power technology is not new. In Europe, where gasoline is always expensive, all auto manufacturers, including Ford and Opel(GM) have been manufacturing almost all of their trucks and SUVs with dual tanks for ever. One for Gasoline and one for GPL ( Liquid propane like for your grill) You just turn a switch and go from gasoline to natural gas which is much cheaper. The technology is well develloped and can be improved if the will and demand were there. In my city and many American cities, they allready use it to power the buses. It burns very clean with no pollution and is very efficient. We have huge reserves of it and so, many areas of the world. Russia has the largest reserves and has been suppling Europe for years. As an interum solution, Natural gas should be one of the answers to independence from Arab oil. I suspect that our politicians prefer to make deals with the ethanol lobby and raise our food prices.Corn ethanol is a very poor substitute.

Answer 1

natural gas is nonrenewable and when burned produces almost the same gases  that we are trying not to produce (carbon monoxide, carbon, etc.)so natural gas is being ignored for those reasons (and more)

Answer 2

Propane is a different product than natural gas first of all.   It is a liquid in the tank while natural gas is still in a gaseous state, just pressurized.   Natural gas is not as plentiful as you might think in the US.   There are at least 7 plans for LNG importation terminals now since there isn't a large enough supply available at the moment.  (I'm not going to get into the argument over weather there is enough in the country, but we just have to drill more or not)    Many people are afraid of change too and wouldn't accept it easily.

Answer 3

It's not a global warming solution...

Answer 4

Natural gas is not a renewable and green fuel.

If I was an unbeliever in global warming then surely I would prefer coal gas because it's more stable and quantitative...

Answer 5

I believe you are correct, and I think you will see more natural gas being used in the near future.  I was at a gas station in Utah last month, and there was a pump for natural gas.  The cost was 63 cents/gal compared to $4.10 for gasoline.  The United States has large nat gas reserves which we will tap into more aggressively because of current economics of oil.  I don't see it as along term solution, but it will mitigate our dependence on foreign oil while we drill for more oil domestically and work towards developing alternative energy.

Answer 6

There's an old Scottish saying, "don't kick a sleeping dog". The current politicians won't budge on this subject until somebody else brings it up. Well the sleeping dog is up! Vote out the current politicians who refuse to use common sense and elect someone who will honestly explore all alternative energy sources so that we're no longer dependent on foreign oil supplies.

Answer 7

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel and still a limited resource.  There's also seriously lacking infrastructure in terms of refueling stations.  People who own natural gas Honda Civics have to lease equipment to hook up to their natural gas lines at home for fuel.

The natural gas Civic is also no more environmentally friendly than the current hybrid Civic or Prius, and hybrids are just about 2 years away from becoming plug-ins and dwarfing natural gas in terms of efficiency and low emissions.  The natural gas Civic also costs slightly more than the hybrid version.

Basically electric vehicle technology is just better than natural gas technology, so that's where the auto companies are focused.  Natural gas (and hydrogen) can work for buses which just need one central refueling station, but once you need refueling stations all over the place, they become impractical.

Answer 8

"I suspect that our politicians prefer to make deals with the ethanol lobby"

it takes nearly as much oil to grow the corn to make ethanol as it would to just make gasoline.

our politicians in the white house  ARE THE OIL LOBBY.

please don't tell me that Cheney's meeting with the oil folks was to ask them to lower prices.

but he won't release the notes because he doesn't want them to feel bad.