The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 633
other hypocritical positions that Bryce takes, it's suddenly okay to "waste" water
because it is for the benefit of the oil industry.
So here we are, it’s 2013 and the oil industry and its shills are hyping the heck
out of CNG. Now they’re even talking about America becoming an exporter of
natural gas and CNG. So armed with this enthusiasm the oil industry wants to
frack here, frack there, frack everywhere. Simply put, they are fracking crazy
(pun definitely intended).
There’s a lot of bad publicity about the fracking process. Some say it’s very
harmful to groundwater, lakes, ponds, and reservoirs; and some like Boone
Pickens say that there has never been a confirmed fracking disaster. I’ve never
done any fracking (he, he, he), so I have no personal experience.
However, here are the problems I do have with CNG above and beyond the fact
that it’s controlled by the oil industry: First, there is only one automobile maker
that is building a CNG-powered car for the American market. That company is
Honda. The CNG car they make is the Civic GX and for several years their
entire annual production was about 1,000 to 1,500 cars (the GX designation
has since been dropped and it’s just Civic CNG). This small number of cars is
more like the output we would expect for a hand-built non-assembly line car.
It’s almost not worth calling it a “production run.” This very small availability was
why I couldn’t buy a Honda Civic. I had the Honda PR people looking for a car
for me but none were available. And I was buying the car, not looking to trade
one for a favorable review.
Then, just a couple of years ago, all Civic GX production stopped while Honda
was building a new factory in Indiana. Honda lost about a year in building new
CNG Civics. In 2012, Honda upped Civic CNG production to around 3,000 cars,
but then stopped production in 2013 because they still have too many 2012
models available.
The Civic is a great car. It’s generally inexpensive, it drives very nicely, it looks
good, and it is a Honda – so you know you can rely on it. However, the Civic is
small-ish, which means that it doesn’t have much room for the over-sized CNG
tanks (they’re located in the trunk). This is one of the more unlikely vehicles that
Honda should have chosen from their lineup for CNG production. So what we
have is one passenger vehicle made for the American market and its availability
is close to none, when it’s being built. On top of that, because of the CNG tanks
it has very limited cargo room.
