Comments on: Pickens’ natural gas plan makes no sense and will never happen

By: Arizona Mildman

Arizona Mildman — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:41:10 +0000

I am impressed at how many things I see wrong in such a small bit of information. The rest was in my opinion, the author’s opinion. When one says, “…as we all know…” then states something that we don’t know, I am wondering who is using the real strawman. OK, T. Boone Pickens is now trying to swiftboat Obama’s healthcare plan. The swiftboat reference is because he did sponsor the swiftboat against Kerry attack that was as full of holes as the Joe the Fake Plumber fiasco. Now, the Democrats in the white house are seriously going ahead to get this deceptive advertising represented as what it truly is -propaganda. Now, the reason I know about T.Boone and Obama’s characterization of him is because I saw the announcement on the news. Some newscaster asks Obama why he is hanging out with the person who funded the whole Swiftboat Pilots Against John Kerry thing. Obama smiled and says he doesn’t want to get involved in that speculation at the time and suggested that Pickens was the world’s utmost authority on Energy. Pickens sometime later comes on his own commercial for the pickens plan and says that Iran who is sitting on the richest oil fields in the world, have already switched to natural gas vehicles. No, it doesn’t take the auto manufacturers to inform us of anything or restructure their plants. I read an article at About.com concerning these kits which reads: “…Converting a conventional gasoline car to CNG is complex, but not necessarily difficult, and quite do-able. And if you are mechanically inclined, it could feasibly be done in your own garage. The other option is to find a willing mechanic that will install a CNG kit for you. One potential hoop to jump through could be emissions certification for your particular state—some states require special conditions since you’d be changing the vehicles “engineered” fuel type. They all differ, and some are easier to work with than others.” Now that that is out of the way, unless one is planning to build a wind turbine themselves and put it in their own backyard (your neighborhood associations might have a tendency to frown on that. being that they have a height of around 72 feet tall) plug ins that might not be able to supply as much energy at night because of the lack of wind at night (as if you drive your car to work and that would deplete the energy as if you were driving all day long). A conversion kit can be found online for about $699 to $1499 depending on how many cylinders your car has. So much for factory rebuild. Anyway, there are some people like one guy, here where I live, who runs his diesel car on used cooking oil he gets for free from restaurants. The problem with supposed “experts” online is that people can find ONE study to tell you ANYTHING you want to say if you don’t research it. That is why a 50 year old medical journal says that cigarette smoking MAY cause shortness of breath when exercising while coffee was said to have 21 poisons in it. If you explore and research this yourself you find out something someone else uncovered.

By: Bob Klare

Bob Klare — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:17:59 +0000

There is a serious problem with this article on natural gas. It uses cubic feet of natural gas as the comparison standard. It should use weight per pound of CO2 emitted. The combustion energy of natural gas per pound of CO2 emitted is 30% greater than that of gasoline. That alone would solve the CO2 greenhouse pollution problem for years to come. Moreover, there are many more advantages to using natural gas as an auto fuel.

By: azdırıcı

azdırıcı — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:37:52 +0000

Green Vehicle’s “Triad”, a nifty 3-wheeler, 2-seater, boosts a range of 100 miles. That is a remarkable achievement, but likely does not take into account energy consumption for Headlights at night, A/C in the summer or Heat in the winter. Also, I take it for granted that this range does not account for Aging of the battery pack.

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By: shop

shop — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:17:17 +0000

Wind energy is a more promising part of his plan, but even that does not seem to be economically viable and this includes the problem of both generation, dependability of strong winds, and cost of distribution systems. Just because Boone says so, does not mean we should hear real details with numerical analysis before getting very excited about it

By: Walter Stuermer

Walter Stuermer — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:36:02 +0000

Article calls Picken’s plan “half-brilliant”. But Picken’s makes two good points about electric vehicles that is totally missing here.

Firstly, because of the low energy to weight ratio (something perhaps that the EEStore battery, if it is real, may change), it is impractical to use batteries for anything except for short range transport.

Secondly, for the same reason, battery based vehicles are useless for truck transport.

And don’t even bother with the switchable battery pack idea. When I see that at my local fuel station, I will know that Rube Goldberg is still alive.

After we take these things into account, the net range of the Triad is likely 50 miles, which is still GREAT, but let’s not pretend that too many families are going to have two of these in the driveway.

Under the best set of circumstances, we might be able to replace HALF the cars in the U.S. with E.V.s like the Triad and NONE of the trucks that more everything across the country.

And this, my friends, is the reason that use of CNG vehicles have to be part of a better U.S. produced, and lower carbon, future.

Half-brilliant???

By: Jim Bullis

Jim Bullis — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:39:46 +0000

Thanks Theta B. for the info. It sounds like there is something real here, but in my feeble defense, the article you referred me to says that the engines are spark ignited. The mix of natural gas and diesel fuel does not mean these engines are diesel.

But I am not sure it matters. These engines are clearly different from the natural gas powered engines that have long been used which were just gasoline engines converted to use natural gas. These conversions were relatively simple. Certainly gasoline engines can be quite large.

However, the real question is, “What is the thermal efficiency?”

But even more important is, I think, the question about how much natural gas is really here without use of expensive extraction processes. I think we have not really settled that one.

By: Theta B.

Theta B. — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:41:43 +0000

Jim,

Do not understand what is meant by “I do not think it is known how to get the diesel process to work with natural gas.”

However, it is known how to get large trucks to operate with NG:
http://www.agweb.com/ Get_Article.aspx?pageid=146577&src=uftruck

Many, many NG trucks operate in Europe, which does not have a dearth of NG refueling stations. That infrastructure issue needs to be solved in the US.

By: Jim Bullis

Jim Bullis — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:22:14 +0000

Passive,

I do not think it is known how to get the diesel process to work with natural gas. Therefore, a first problem would be efficiency. Large truck engines probably get about 35% efficiency. Also, just getting the heavy duty capability out of a gasoline like engine is not necessarily straight forward.

The fact that the Prius engine running on gasoline is so efficient is that it is very optimally loaded and it runs over a limited speed range, with peak loads being supported by the electric system.

So as you suggest, there is more to this than Pickens seems to have considered.

I also am a fan of electric systems, but it the impressive capabilities of diesel engines can not be ignored. If the encouraging developments of catalytic converters that remove NOx gases from the exhaust, these will be very hard to beat. The diesel efficiency could actually go up if NOx could be removed, so peak burning temperatures could increase.

Even as things are now, diesel engines beat electricity from coal, because the efficiency is better and the CO2 per BTU is less. Diesel comes out about even with simpler natural gas power plants.

By: Passive

Passive — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:14:19 +0000

This article is certainly interesting, but I would love to see a follow up that addressed whether we could reduce our oil usage by a few percent simply by switching the trucking fleet to LNG or CNG.

From watching Pickens on the Daily Show last night, he seems quite clear that his plan is merely a stopgap, to reduce some of our existing consumption. I was really prepared not to like him (given his history, there are plenty of reasons), but he seemed like an old man just trying to do his part for the next generation, not some opportunist looking to make a quick buck.

As part of a family of Truckers, my experience is they replace their trucks every 5 years or so, and they are extremely concerned with fuel costs. The trucking industry is one of the most involved in reducing fuel consumption, as even a single point improvement in efficiency can save thousands of dollars.

As a big fan of electric vehicles, I’m also aware of their shortcomings. At the moment, we are YEARS, if not DECADES away from a working hybrid or all electric truck. The long distances required, combined with the heavy loads, would require batteries that either weigh quite a lot (reducing efficiency and available capacity), or (possibly and) have an incredible energy density. Those laptop battery explosions? Multiply that by tens or hundreds of thousands.

Given these two factors, it seems to me like converting the long fleet to NG could be a very good step.

What are the arguments against converting the truck fleet to NG?