Posted by WA-Hal on February 14, 2010 at 17:55:09 from (208.81.157.90):
In Reply to: Re: LNG posted by JMOR on February 14, 2010 at 16:17:42:
As others wrote, the trouble with Liquified Natural Gas is that it has to be kept incredibly cold for it to remain in a liquid state. Maybe it is possible to pressurize it enough to keep it liquid at normal temperatures, but the pressures would have to be way up there, and therefore the tank would have to be super strong and probably super expensive. I get the impression that normal temperature LNG is not a practical idea.
About 25 or 30 years ago, my department did an experiment, converting a Chevy Caprice to run on compressed natural gas, as well as gasoline. At that time natural gas prices were way less than they are now, and it was thought that money might be saved over the increasing costs of gasoline.
The CNG tanks took up most of the room in the trunk and added a bunch of weight to the Caprice. The conversion was also pretty expensive, although they might have had a grant or other funding to do the experiment.
Running the car on CNG, it had quite a bit less power than on gasoline, although admittedly this could have been because the tuning was better using gasoline as the fuel. The car ran OK using the CNG, but the big problem was that even with the trunkful of high pressure tanks, we could only store enough CNG for about half of an 8 hour shift. And then we would have to drive to the local natural gas distribution company shop, since they were the only place around that had the equipment to pressurize the natural gas as much as it needed to be for that purpose. That took lots of man hours away from other duties during the experiment.
There was also some concern about safety--no one really knew what might happen if the Caprice was rear-ended. Maybe the CNG cylinders were durable enough to not break open, but maybe not. Fortunately no such accident ever happened.
I think it was decided that using CNG was very impractical, and probably not something that would be done widely, at least in the forseeable future. For the technology available then, and probably what is available now, normal temperature liquid fuel is the most practical motor vehicle fuel.
I think that same natural gas distributor still runs some of its vehicles on CNG, but probably only in medium size trucks that never get too far away from the fueling equipment.
But the guys that had to deal with that converted Caprice were really glad when the experiment was over and the equipment was removed. Using CNG was just too much hassle.
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