By JOHN T. BOAL
With $4-a-gallon gasoline making teeth grind and cascading nearly everyone into an even tighter economic bind, is there an overlooked, albeit partial, solution that continually gets a cursory drive-by without a fuller examination?
Consider the CNG acronym you see inside that blue diamond sticker on the Metro buses. CNG, or Compressed Natural Gas, has been routinely shrugged off as a possible mainstream alternative fuel for passenger cars. Most conventional thinkers view it as strictly for government and private fleets, transit buses and refuse trucks.
Au contraire, concerned conservation owl who gives a hoot and who doesn’t want to pollute.
Yes, natural gas, the very same gas we all use to heat our water and home that’s in plentiful supply in North America, is also available in its compressed state for fleets and from one car manufacturer.
An abundant supply is one good sign, but what about basic day-to-day distribution here in our car-centric commuter community?
Station access
Commission Web site, “There are over 100 public CNG fueling stations in major metropolitan areas from Los Angeles to the Mexican border.” In fact, the commission says our state now has over 200 CNG fueling stations and 50 more are under construction.
Yet the appeal for this clean Rodney Dangerfield alternative accelerates once people realize the price for a gallon-to-gallon equivalent today is $2.18, about 40 percent less than what we’re forking over at the corner gasoline pump.
It gets better. There’s an incentive program offered by Clean Energy, a natural gas provider, whereby you can enjoy a CNG price freeze of $1.99 per gallon for the next 18 months if you purchase a Civic GX from a select few participating Honda dealers in Southern California. With an 8-gallon tank, that’s less than $16 to fill up each and every time into the fall of 2009. And for a cherry on top of this freeze, there’s a $4,000 federal tax deduction for this car.
Or, if you’re into home refueling, there’s a new appliance called, appropriately enough, “Phill” from FuelMaker Corp. This little handy device enables CNG vehicles to fill-‘er-up overnight from your natural gas line in the garage.
While it’s also possible to convert your standard unleaded automobile into a CNG vehicle, in 2004 there were actually nine CNG models available right off the lot from GM, Ford and Honda. However, stating there weren’t enough fueling stations and the public interest was running on empty for CNG, the two U.S. manufacturers stopped making CNG models.
Hmmm, that’s odd. In 1998, Mark Looper, who has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech, drove from California to Maine and back refueling his CNG van all across the country. “I am a perfectly ordinary consumer (better informed than most, but certainly not as well as some),” he wrote at his Web site, altfuels.org. “The whole point of ‘Clean Across America and Back’ was to demonstrate that alternative-fueled vehicles are ready for prime time.”
Increased presence
Some of the stations Looper used 10 years ago are now closed. Still, there are now more than 1,500 Natural Gas Vehicle fueling stations in the United States, with over half of them available for public use, according to the trade association Natural Gas Vehicles for America.
Despite this availability of CNG, we only hear of E85 85 percent corn ethanol, 15 percent gasoline that’s going to fuel our cars. Yet there are only three E85 fueling stations open to the public in California compared with 200-plus CNG stations that are available with a fuel that runs cleaner and at less cost.
Of course, this alternative will not bring OPEC to its knees, but CNG is an economic breakout fuel for all those who just need a “commuter car” and want to gain a little respect from the tyranny of oil dependence.
John T. Boal is the western region managing director of a New York-based non-profit and was a co-author of “Chicken Soup for the Volunteer’s Soul.” He said he has no direct or indirect financial interest in the CNG industry. He lives in Burbank.
