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With the Oil / NatGas ratio flirting with 50:1 (!), that certainly makes a lot of sense:
How Natural Gas Will Transform the Automobile
February 29, 2012 - 4:29pm | admin
By Michael S. Lerner
Gasoline’s reign of dominance in worldwide transportation is being eroded by a new contender. The challenge is not imminent, but it can no longer be dismissed or ignored. Take a walk through the streets of New Delhi, and everything from passenger cars and commercial trucks to the city buses and the three-wheel motorized rickshaws runs on natural gas. The Indian city has the world’s largest municipal fleet of natural gas vehicles (NGVs), at 450,000. Working with Sweden, the global pioneer of NGVs using renewable natural gas, New Delhi will soon be using biogas generated from its own sewage treatment plants to fuel some of its NGVs. Remarkable, yes, but it is far from an isolated case. Countries all over the world are enacting similar programs. Gasoline-fueled vehicles will still redominate for quite some time, but the future of automobiles is already here.
The ongoing mainstream debates over energy for transportation tend to pit conventional gasoline against mixed ethanol-gasoline blends, 100 percent biofuel, hybrid gasoline-electricity, and 100 percent electricity. Even with rising fuel-efficiency standards in gasoline-fueled vehicles, gasoline still accounts for the majority of carbon emissions. More importantly, gasoline prolongs an increasingly untenable dependence on oil. Yet, in many parts of the world, gasoline is often subsidized and therefore tends to be cheaper than alternative transportation fuels. The already established infrastructure of pipelines and refueling stations for gasoline is also a huge advantage against the high costs of constructing new ones for alternative fuels. So even though their costs are slowly but steadily decreasing, alternative fuels remain years away from widespread adoption.
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CONTINUED HERE.
How Natural Gas Will Transform the Automobile
February 29, 2012 - 4:29pm | admin
By Michael S. Lerner
Gasoline’s reign of dominance in worldwide transportation is being eroded by a new contender. The challenge is not imminent, but it can no longer be dismissed or ignored. Take a walk through the streets of New Delhi, and everything from passenger cars and commercial trucks to the city buses and the three-wheel motorized rickshaws runs on natural gas. The Indian city has the world’s largest municipal fleet of natural gas vehicles (NGVs), at 450,000. Working with Sweden, the global pioneer of NGVs using renewable natural gas, New Delhi will soon be using biogas generated from its own sewage treatment plants to fuel some of its NGVs. Remarkable, yes, but it is far from an isolated case. Countries all over the world are enacting similar programs. Gasoline-fueled vehicles will still redominate for quite some time, but the future of automobiles is already here.
The ongoing mainstream debates over energy for transportation tend to pit conventional gasoline against mixed ethanol-gasoline blends, 100 percent biofuel, hybrid gasoline-electricity, and 100 percent electricity. Even with rising fuel-efficiency standards in gasoline-fueled vehicles, gasoline still accounts for the majority of carbon emissions. More importantly, gasoline prolongs an increasingly untenable dependence on oil. Yet, in many parts of the world, gasoline is often subsidized and therefore tends to be cheaper than alternative transportation fuels. The already established infrastructure of pipelines and refueling stations for gasoline is also a huge advantage against the high costs of constructing new ones for alternative fuels. So even though their costs are slowly but steadily decreasing, alternative fuels remain years away from widespread adoption.
...
CONTINUED HERE.