It’s an interesting thing that vehicles with engines that burn compressed natural gas (CNG) have never been so much as encouraged by the same government that has aggressively pushed battery-powered vehicles. It’s interesting for several reasons, the chief one being the government would not have to push them. Because they solve every problem associated with battery powered vehicles.
Maybe that’s why.
All that would be needed to make CNG-powered vehicles as or even more practical than gas-burning vehicles is an apparatus to allow ordinary people to fuel them quickly. Which CNG powered vehicles can be – unlike battery powered vehicles, which cannot be charged quickly except in a relative sense. As in relative to how long it takes to charge them at home (many hours, if not overnight). At what what are styled “fast” chargers, it is possible to recover a partial charge in 20-30 minutes or so.
And that is faster than waiting for hours.
But it’s not quick. At least, not relative how long it takes to fuel a gas-powered vehicle. Or a CNG powered vehicle.
Not in principle, at least.
I have a 200 gallon propane tank in my back yard. Propane is similar to CNG in that both are gaseous hydrocarbon fuels rendered into liquids by pressurizing them. When my tank runs low, the propane guy comes in his tanker truck to refill it. This takes him about 10 minutes. To fill a 200 gallon tank. Most gas-powered vehicles carry about 15-20 gallons of liquid gasoline. The equivalent could be carried in pressurized CNG tanks, with the only meaningful difference being the equipment needed to transfer the fuel from storage tank to in-the-vehicle tank(s).
Back in the mid-1990s, General Motors and Ford demo’d prototype CNG-powered vehicles to the media; I was one of the car journalists who was given the opportunity to check out and drive these vehicles. One of them was a converted (to run on CNG) Crown Victoria, which was a full-size, rear-wheel-drive sedan with a V8 engine. The kind of car regular Americans of modest means used to commonly drive because they were not – at that time – $100,000 luxury brand cars, as all such cars are today.
Such large vehicles are perfect vehicles for CNG because they have plenty of room for CNG tanks. Americans – regular Americans – could afford to drive large vehicles again. 
Anyhow, the point here is that the CNG-powered Crown Vic I test drove was in every way functionally the same as any gas-powered Vic except in terms of refueling its CNG cylinders, which (at the time) required specialized equipment similar to the equipment the propane guy who refills my 200 lb. tank has.
But this not an insuperable obstacle. At least, not as insuperable as instilling a full charge in a battery-powered vehicle’s battery pack in the same time it takes to fully refuel a gas-engined vehicle’s tank. The latter being a problem of chemistry and physics while the former is merely a problem of designing a safe, layman-usable hook-up. Transferring the fuel is not a problem, as such.
Transferring the electricity is. 
Volts are hard to carry in a can back to your out-of-power-EV. They are also harder – and much more expensive – to transmit down the line.
CNG, on the other hand, can be trucked from a central depot to fueling stations, which can be anywhere it is economically sensible to build a gas station. The fundamentals are the same in that the gas (or CNG) station can be here and the fuel source can be there – even if there is hundreds of miles away and off the beaten path because the distance between the two points easily traversed by truck. It is not a problem to truck CNG or propane anywhere. The only difference vs. trucking liquid gasoline being the method of transferring the fuel from the truck to the tanks at the station. If it’s a gasoline tanker truck, the liquid fuel is just pumped into the underground tanks. A CNG tanker could just as easily – just about – transfer the pressurized fuel it is carrying into pressurized storage tanks.
This is commonly done already.
The only thing, then, that would need to be figured out to make CNG-powered passenger vehicles as easy to refuel as gasoline-powered vehicles and in about the same amount of time would be to engineer the hook ups in such a way as to be safe and easily used by the general public.
Very doable.
Electricity, on the other hand, has to be transmitted from the source where it is generated to the outlet – whether that is in your garage or at a public “fast” charging station. In other words, EV charging stations are tethered to their source of electricity – just as EVs themselves are tethered – via their charge cords limited range.
It is not possible to truck high voltage electricity to “fast” chargers located in the country. That is why all the EV “fast” chargers extant are in urban/suburban areas or near major highways, where they can connect to grid power. Expanding this infrastructure to be on par with the network of gas stations would take decades and billions. And even if the cost were no object – and even if it were possible to build out this infrastructure in months rather than decades – it would still not address the problem of how long it takes to even partially charge a battery-powered device.
How long would it take for engineers to figure out a way to enable an average American who knows how to pump gasoline – and can do it safely – to pump CNG in about the same time it takes him to pump his tank full of gas? Probably six months (if that) of working on the problem.
And there’d no longer be a problem – either in terms of “the environment” or the wait. Or anything else that can honestly by called a problem.
CNG burns exceedingly cleanly. It produces no meaningfully harmful combustion byproducts. It burns so cleanly that oil change intervals can be greatly extended, potentially reducing the amount of waste oil generated by an enormous amount. Spark plugs in a CNG-burning engine will generally last the life of the engine because CNG doesn’t foul the plugs nearly as much or as fast as burning gasoline does.
And CNG can be used to power almost any existing engine. Only the fuel system has to be altered to handle the. It is not necessary to engineer whole new engines. Enormous amounts of money could be saved – both for the manufacturers of vehicles as well as buyers of vehicles.
And those vehicles could be large, rear-drive sedans (and trucks and SUVs) with V8 engines because they would be both environmentally innocuous and inexpensive to drive because CNG is cheap and the supply is enormous. America has enough proven CNG in reserve for the next several hundred years.
In sum, CNG-powered vehicles would solve every problem they tell us requires that we stop driving gasoline-powered vehicles without any of the problems that attend driving battery powered vehicles.
And that, of course, is precisely the problem.
From a certain point-of-view.
. . .
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T. Boone Pickens called and he appreciates your support of his plan.
Mr. Pickens had a good plan. I think it would be good to give people the option.
CNG is compressed natiral gas,worked on transit busses in DC and LA for years.Had to have the compressor on site as it is at 3800PSI when unit is full and compressor shuts down.LNG is liqiified and is trucked in,we had issues with it stratifiing in the tank and ending up with non burning components.of the gas.Propane got a black eye as it comes from an evil oil refinery.CNG worked best but you could not get to far from the compressor station.
Eric wrote: “And those vehicles could be large … with V8 engines because they would be both environmentally innocuous and inexpensive to drive because CNG is cheap and the supply is enormous.”
Yet, we already have such a fuel. It’s called gasoline. But our Rulers lie about it environmentally, and our Rulers who also own the petroleum industry criminally overcharge us for it.
In crypto-jew Trump’s first term as the sElected president, I remember buying gas at a Walmart station in Michigan for $1.69 per gallon. And nobody in the petro business went without a meal. The fact is, a fair price would be less than that. But Trump said then that he would work on “the recovery of the oil business.”
In the 1970s, the criminal hoax of a “gasoline shortage” killed my parents’ modest tourism-based business by doubling the price of gasoline. No president nor any other crypto-jew leader said they would work on the recovery of White-owned tourism businesses.
And to this day, after all these decades, hardly any people recognize the Enemy jews and say what must be done. Ignorant? Stupid? Or cowards?
CNG vehicles work too well and make too much sense—Remember, they’re not really trying to control the climate—they’re trying to control YOU.
This is EXACTLY what I was thinking! Why don’t we use CNG/propane to power our vehicles? It burns SO CLEANLY, that it can be used INDOORS (provided there’s adequate ventilation, of course). And unlike liquid fuels, it doesn’t require refining (other than adding mercaptan for leak detection).
But NOPE! When it comes to government “solutions”, alternatives are “verboten”!
During the 70s fuel crunch, guys with pickups were doing the duel fuel conversion. Remember then V8 gasoline trucks were carbed and shops quickly figured out the conversion procedure. Give up some room in that 8 ft bed for the tank, at least you could get to work without waiting in a gas station lineup.
I converted my 20 year old generator to dual fuel four years ago. Tricky part is the propane regulator for the propane tank the first adjustable one failed while sitting. Lots of info online to make it successful. The dual fuel carb was $29 on Amazon.
Come to think of it, there is synthetic gasoline, whoddathunkit?
Synthetic gasoline from methanol/methane is done.
Topsoe synthetic gasoline. TIGAS, Topsoe Improved Gasoline Synthesis.
Synthetic gasoline is competitive, synthetic oil, synthetic gasoline, might as well.
Methane to synthetic gasoline, centuries of methane available for commercial use, a commodity, synthetic gasoline will be perfect.
Capture as much as you can and make gasoline great again.
Just an fyi, gasoline tankers don’t “pump” gas into the customer’s underground tank. The transfer is completed by gravity. Hook up the hoses, open the valves and let gravity do the rest. Simple. About 300 gallons per minute
And good luck finding a station willing to spend money on tank maintenance getting the accumulation of water removed.
So as that tanker drops the refill it stirs up the water and crud. I avoid a station actively refilling if at all possible. “See ya in a few hours!”
I don’t think they really cared about “water and underground storage.” Blah blah. That was about getting average American people out of the gas station business. Give the filling stations to Indians from some province that ends in rat and opening up more corporate “convenience stores” instead. In the early-mid 1990s there were a ton of gas station closures, then you would see the “storage tanks” being dug up under the environmental pantomime. And Presto, Patel and Mustafa reopen the station and jack up the price of washer fluid and paper towels. It’s a sick game
Going back to the CNG question, there is no way that Mustafa nor Banjeet would understand nor care about CNG pumps.
Good article to piggyback on Eric’s.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/energy/gas-car-ban-blocked/
“In sum, CNG-powered vehicles would solve every problem they tell us requires that we stop driving gasoline-powered vehicles…”
…Except emissions of the devil gas carbon dioxide, Eric. Though it is said that CO2 emissions decreased considerably with the use of natural gas as a replacement for coal and oil for energy.
Luckily, last time I checked, you could still have your average car converted to CNG for about $1k or so.
However, there really is an infrastructure problem, not that it couldn’t be rectified. My friend’s daughter was gifted a CNG car. It was a small sedan of some kind. It didn’t have much of a range, however. Maybe 100 miles if I remember correctly. The only place to refuel the car anywhere near her was something like 15 miles out of town, even in the Phoenix area. There went 30 miles of range for each refill.
Now, of course, many houses are equipped with a natural gas input. That should be able to supply a home fueling station. Then the gas stations would need to be outfitted with the proper pumps. I don’t ever see it happening.
Got the $$$$ there are home pump/refill systems available.
https://www.cng4america.com/home-fueling.html
In the late 1990s – early 2000s, Ford offer a CNG prep kit from the factory on the F150s.
Back in the 70’s my father was the general manager of a wholesale food distributor in Oakland CA. The had deliver trucks (Ford 350 with refrigerated walk-in box) that ran all up and down California. (This was when CA was more or less free when you could start a business and had a good chance of success) When the gas crisis hit in the 70’s the converted half the fleet to propane gas. What they found was the cylinder heads needed to be replaced at a higher frequency due to the heating at the exhaust valves. This required going to sodium filled exhaust valves as a replacement. When gas came back down to market rates in the 80’s they went back to gasoline.
I digress: there is something marvelously simple and effective about a gallon of gas: 125,000 of BTU’s of energy that you can safely transport/store and use at will. It smells strong but attractive. We can’t touch it very long and don’t dare consume it, but it is attractive because it is energy. We’re attracted to energy sources such as sunlight and food. Nuclear might be the exception.
55 years ago today, at Kent State, four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard.
Three of the four victims were Jews, so it was a micro-Holocaust that day.
Hey, what were three Jews doing at a protest? Being agitators?
When you are anti-war, you can get shot and killed.
Good thing it is a Sunday on this May 4th.
In Eastern Europe, for a while, maybe from 1990 to the mid 2010’s, you’d see a huge number of CNG cars. It’s actually pretty simple to convert a gasoline car to dual fuel, since the engine works exactly the same on either fuel.
Gasoline is taxed aggressively in all of Europe, they earn less than we do and pay double for gasoline. However, this wasn’t the case for natural gas, it was quite affordable. Pretty much every taxi you’d take was a gas to diesel conversion due to the lower running costs.
These conversions weren’t great – you’d need to start and warm the engine on gasoline, then flip over to natural gas once it was warm. It was still better than paying a fortune for gasoline, though. You’d fill them at CNG pumps, which became ubiquitous.
Times changed and these cars disappeared because the newer cars, compliant with Euro-5 and Euro-6 emissions standards, are so full of sensors and electronics that you can’t modify them anymore.
It was pretty awesome, actually. All the converted cars had port fuel injection, so all you’d do is add a second port injector for CNG, sized appropriately for the engine, and it could even run off the same control signal as the gasoline injector.
Bah! Brain fart. I meant pretty much every taxi you’d take was a gasoline to CNG conversion
‘natural gas was quite affordable’ — OppositeLock
Often this arbitrage between gasoline and natural gas prices arises in the US too, despite gasoline being taxed lower here than in Europe. Natural gas is up from its early 2024 low of under $2.00 per 10,000 MMBtu, but still quite cheap in historical, inflation-adjusted terms. Chart:
https://www.mrci.com/pdf/ng.pdf
Naturally, entrenched interests — automakers, regulators, the liquid petroleum industry — do not want us to avail ourselves of cheaper fuel options. Instead we must pay and pay — for the greater good.
Don’t be silly Eric, they don’t WANT to solve problem. Especially not with a system they can’t turn off at their convenience.
Researching problems can be a lifetime’s career if you never solve them.
A New York Slimes stenographer, ‘Eli Saslow’, tries his hand at auto journalism, with an interminable anecdotal account of daily life at a Buy Here, Pay Here used car lot:
‘Antonio explained that he would have to buy her a new radiator from AutoZone, which sourced them from China. The retail price had gone up by about $40 in the last month, which meant the repair would cost a little more than $300 even if Antonio only charged her minimum wage for Paul’s time and labor.’
https://archive.ph/2HW3g#selection-4869.87-4869.396
And so it goes, as ol’ Kurt Vonnegut would say. ‘Saslow’ obviously has never opened a hood or gotten a speck of dirt under his manicured nails:
‘It had been in the shop a half dozen times since, and Antonio had replaced the throttle, the gas pedal, the fuse, the thermostat, the sparkplug and the ignition coil.’
The fuse. The sparkplug. Good thing there’s only one of them! Otherwise this could get expensive … 🙁
What stands out in this overly long vanity piece is the utter bafflement of ‘Saslow’ at the altruism of used car dealer Antonio, who gives breaks to his struggling customers despite barely getting along himself.
There were quite a few vehicles on the road that might have been WI govt vehicles that were CNG. I recall seeing the prominent logos. Duel fuel if I recall. It’s not just possible, it’s been done. But like you concluded, it’s not about the environment.
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
10-20 years ago CNG seemed not-uncommon for government, public transportation, & commercial fleet vehicles. (They had a blue diamond that said CNG). Seemed to work OK for the most part, at least as far as I could tell. Now I don’t see it much.
When I lived in NJ there were CNG stations around but every one was under lock and key (government use only). Honda sold a CNG Civic that was available to the public but nobody bought it because there wasn’t any way to fill it. Honda even said if you used a home refueling station it would void the warranty.
Since the average person has trouble piloting a car inbetween the lanes at 70 mph, what makes you think that he or she can fill a car with CNG?
Instead, we are producing LNG to suck out of the ground and export to foreign countries. Go figure. I’m not against exporting, but let us have some.
Great essay. CNG technology has been around since the 1980s if not longer. Over forty years ago, as a young undergraduate, I wrote my congressman asking him to encourage CNG vehicles as a response to the so-called “energy crisis” and potential lack of Middle Eastern oil everyone was shrieking about back then.
Crickets.
Of course back then I knew nothing about how influential ethanol and EV lobbies (not to mention foreign lobbies like the Israel lobby) could buy congressmen like Saturday night whores, and I stupidly thought they wanted to consider and debate the best solutions to our nation’s problems.
CNG taxis have been motoring around Japan since the late 1960s:
‘Most of Japan’s taxi fleet has been using liquefied propane or butane gas for more than a decade. About 45,000 taxis in Tokyo, logging an average of approx. 75,000 mi/yr, use LPG because of significant (50%) savings on fuel costs. LPG use requires good engineering of the vehicle and rigorous maintenance, including a mandatory change of gas tanks every two years. Peoples Gas Light and Coke Co. is planning to fuel its fleet of automotive vehicles with natural gas.’ (15 September 1980)
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6364939
Two questions arise:
1. Why didn’t all of Japan’s auto fleet, including privately-owned vehicles, switch over to CNG? Is CNG fuel some kind of subsidy to the taxi industry? Or the liquid-fuel industry won’t let it happen?
2. Why does the US ignore technology that ‘wasn’t invented here’? Every other developed country, without exception, achieves a longer life expectancy at half or less the per capita health care cost.
Solutions are available off the freaking shelf. But like the Bizarro World limned in the Superman comics of my youth, we dwell in a cube-shaped country, buy Bizarro bonds (“guaranteed to lose money!”) and use our alarm clocks to tell us when to go to bed. Sheesh!
You can convert the engine to burn propane too. A friend had a Chevy pickup that burned propane, easy to do.
Propane is under pressure, 125 pounds, and is cold when it leaks some from the bleed valve, you know the 40 pound tank is full. Filled lots of 40 pound tanks for bird scares.
A 1000 gallon propane tank on the farm solved problems. There was another 1000 gallon propane tank to fuel the grain dryer. You’re using 15,000 gallons of propane in a wet year to dry the grains.
CNG is a safer fuel than a propane-fueled engine.
Both will work to start an engine.
My uncle also had a propane-fueled tractor. He used it to pump water from potholes into drainage ditches. The tractor was in neutral, the power take off in gear to run the pump to drain the pothole. The tractor ran 24/7 until it needed some more propane. The local co-op delivered propane to the tractor when the tank ran dry.
Nobody had to be there for the tractor to pump water.
Remembering the good old days of warm summer days and good weather.
CNG would work …..That is why we can not have it. The goal here is the bus..Not personal transport.
Bam.
The great unwashed cannot be allowed to drive.
It’s also fairly easy to retrofit existing vehicles to run dual-fuel systems with CNG and gasoline. Or better yet, CNG/diesel where the ECM can dynamically adjust the two for optimal burn.
@Eric – The Panther platform was very forgiving/large and lent itself to experimentation, with tooling which was paid off sometime during the Reagan Administration. When Ford almost brought back the Crown Vic, the prototype I saw was in Chicago which makes me believe they were going to revive the Explorer platform’s capability to carry a body-on-frame design sedan.
Alas, the Panther is no more.
BTW, did you see the news about Capo Gecko announcing retirement from running his rackets yesterday?
Capo Abel has been a loyal Soldier in the Energy racket, but the Gecko’s announcement caught everyone by surprise.
On the topic of alternate fuels I remember Brazil tried that decades ago and the results were sub optimal but that was probably using carbs so EFI alcohol might work better but as the BTU value of the fuel is lower your mileage will go down. Water will accumulate in tanks with alcohol in them so stainless steel might be a better choice for tanks and that’s part of the reason you shouldn’t leave ethanol fuel in steel gas tanks when not in regular use.
Propane and CNG will have problems with severe cold wherein the fuel doesn’t readily convert back to a gas. Stationary tanks can use heaters but cars don’t really have that option but for most of the country that won’t be a major problem. That said it will be a problem for motorcycles, snowmobiles and the like.
Morning, Eric.
One other possibility nobody ever seems to mention is alcohol. All you need to run a gasoline engine on alcohol is about 40% more fuel, so bigger injectors and a bit more flow.
It burns cleanly, relative to gasoline, and is the ultimate renewable resource because we can make it out of CORN.
Why the ‘Corn Refiners Association’ didn’t push more for entirely alcohol-fueled cars instead of ruining engines on E85 is a mystery, but alcohol would seem to be as viable an “alternative fuel source” as CNG, without some of the logistic issues.
Morning, letmepic –
Yes, but CNG has the great virtue of being “there” – no need to manufacture it. Just can it – so to speak. The proven supply is enormous, too. Enough to last for generations. Alcohol, on the other hand, has to be made – from corn, for instance. Or sugar. Those fuel stocks have to be grown first, requiring diversion of cropland and other resources. The raw material then has to be transformed into the fuel (alcohol).
CNG seems much more sensible to me. Also, it isn’t corrosive and so no issues with engine/fuel system damage – which is an issue with alcohol as a fuel.
But it’s an evil “fossil fuel,” you see, do we have to sacrifice our transportation to Mother Gaia for our sins.
I’m sure that you have noticed but they are also trying to ban natural gas stoves and furnaces and replace them with expensive electric appliances, so they would prefer that you fucking freeze to death in the winter rather than have cheap, convenient heat.
On the topic of gas stoves…I like to cook, and I love my gas stove. And I’d never call for anything to be banned by the government for the realization of the nanny state.
But that having been said, as someone that owns a gas stove, one of the unfortunate results of using a gas stove, is they put out a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into a home’s atmosphere (my gas clothes dryer does as well), and so there are definite health risks associated with using them.
I 100% recommend getting an air quality monitor that monitors CO2, and using it in places like the kitchen, and when you see CO2 levels start to climb, open windows and turn on the vent fan to keep the levels in check. High levels of indoor CO2 can be a direct cause of what people mistakenly call the “flu” or a “cold”. It can make you sick in both the short term and long term.
When you said last for generations you may be off in time, but to our benefit.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/26/science/geochemist-says-oil-fieldsmay-be-refilled-naturally.html
https://principlescience.blogspot.com/2012/01/refilling-oil-fields.html
https://alethonews.com/2014/12/28/oil-fields-are-refilling-naturally-sometimes-rapidly/
Geologists have suspected for at least 30 years that what we call “fossil” fuels are generated by some unknown process or moving deep in the Earth in some unknown ways via deep faults such that oil and gas may not be quite as limited as they’d have you think. That’s not to suggest it’s limitless but peak oil may not be quite true either.
In a non-clown world we’d have honest discussion about energy use and our mix of sources. Wind and solar are there, why not use them? Electricity makes sense for stationary devices or short haul transportation. Free electricity could be used to make other fuels. I’m not opposed to internal combustion but no one wants pollution so if we can use electricity to make hydrogen fuels, that might be an option to reduce pollution in dense urban places, too.
Ethanol is a lot more expensive per mile than CNG in the US. The Corn lobby would never allow large scale imports from places like Brazil where the opposite is true and infrastructure developed to manufacture alcohol-base fuels from readily available materials there at a lower price than the US.
And, with little or now push there are hundreds of stations around the country that provide CNG NOW! However, we can’t have a solution to a made-up problem otherwise we wouldn’t need massive bureaucracies to hector us into tethered compliance.
Here’s the link the the federal GovCo site that shows locations.
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/natural-gas-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=CNG