The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 632
MPG it would if I had purchased the gasoline-powered version. The price of a
“gallon” of CNG can be considerably less than gasoline; in some facilities, the
CNG cost a bit more than half the price of gasoline. The CNG keeps the engine
cleaner and the emissions are cleaner than those that would come from gasoline.
CNG does not damage engines any more than ethanol does, and both of them
are better for an internal combustion engine than gasoline. CNG, like ethanol,
does not cause engine knocking.
There is however one great big glaring problem with CNG (there are a few
“small” ones too, which I’ll address shortly). This big problem is that CNG is
controlled by the oil industry. This means that no matter what, if we rely on CNG
we will be screwed blue and tattooed by the exact same people that are keeping
our economy in chains. It is this connection that has soured me on CNG. I still
love and use my van, and I always enjoy saving money every time I have to fill
the van up, but CNG is not the solution we need.
When Robert Bryce wrote GUSHER OF LIES he obviously hadn’t yet received
the memo from the oil gods that CNG was good, after all. Although it has been
known for many years that the U.S. and Canada have tremendous reserves of
natural gas, Bryce writes about dwindling Canadian and America resources and
foresees America becoming a major importer of natural gas. He uses the expectation of our becoming a CNG importer to again argue that it’s not worth
struggling for energy independence; that we should just give in to the inevitable.
Somewhere around 2010 Robert Bryce must have re-checked his email and
found the “CNG is OK” memo because that’s when he started to write about
America’s huge natural gas resources. This is around the time that the oil industry started looking for large-scale government aid to help them develop the
“suddenly” discovered domestic reserves. The government aid that the oil industry is seeking is subsidies in various forms. So once again, because the
subsidies would be for the oil industry the subsidies are okay. In his most recent
writing about natural gas and CNG that I came across I wasn’t able to find any
criticism related to any type of subsidy for natural gas and CNG.
One other thing, before I forget, remember in the last section regarding water
usage how Bryce decries the "heavy" water needs of ethanol, and the part about
how much water is needed to make gasoline? Well, fracking also requires huge
amounts of water, and some of the fracking is taking place in areas where water
is particularly scarce. Of course, Bryce never mentions this; like with all the
