Webinar: Promoting Highly Fuel Efficient Automobiles

Forgot to mention - to register go to www.webinars.cullbridge.com

Jay Kassirer
Cullbridge Marketing, and Tools of Change
Canada
www.cullbridge.com

I would like to ask why those advocates who seek more sustainable transportation do not expand their focus to also seek changing behaviors and attitudes of those executives and politicians who have rejected mass production of vehicles for the North American markets that use non-petroleum gaseous motor fuels, aka cheap and abundant natural gas. Widespread deployment of NGVs, both using compressed and liquefied forms of methane, is common in other countries. When properly designed and mass produced, NGVs are affordable and fuel stations can easily tap into readily available natural gas pipelines. Why not promote immediate and widespread use of NGVs in North America to save consumers money, reduce pollution AND reduce carbon emissions by 20% to 30%? More importantly mass production of NGVs would make distributed production of various renewable methane-hydrogen blends economically feasible. Methane-hydrogen blends can be used in current technology NGVs; no technology breakthroughs needed. A more efficient vehicle that uses liquid petroleum motor fuels, even when blended with biofuels, is still a vehicle that operates primarily on petroleum. If the political goal is to reduce dependency on oil, why do policy makers not seek to harness market forces to solve this problem? Policy that create new, more sustainable commercialization pathways to low-carbon, zero-carbon motor fuels and vehicles using natural gas would create jobs, save consumers money, make everybody more secure and be more sustainable than current policy, which merely fosters continued dependency on liquid petroleum-based motor fuels.

bruderly 

Bruderly asks "Why not promote immediate and widespread use of NGVs in North America to save consumers money.." Yes natural gas as a motor fuel produces less carbon at the point of use. However it is not a wonderful solution. Gaseous natural gas is low in energy per unit volume, and even in liquid form natural gas has far lower energy content per equivalent volume than gasoline, thus vehicles running on it must either have much larger fuel tanks, or settle for a considerably reduced range between refuelings. A significant chunk of the gas we currently use is imported, which does not solve energy dependency problems, and the process of liquifying/shipping/storing all that product is not without costs to the environment. In very cold winters in the Northeast the current gas distribution system is strained to the breaking point, imagine adding the enormous demand for fueling millions of motor vehicles to the existing demand and you can see there would be a need for huge investment in infrastructure. And once demand for natural gas as a motor fuel soared, the price would rise commensurately. Natural gas is a finite resource, just like petroleum and is slightly less polluting, so if it is more of a "sustainable" fuel, it is not by much.

Mel Tremper
United States