The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 631
COMPRESSED NATURAL GAS
I like CNG; Bob Gordon likes CNG. We’ve written about it and talked it up for
several years. We’ve noted in several stories how even oil-rich Iran is relying
on CNG for their domestic energy needs. What’s more, a couple of years before
I purchased the non-flex fuel Ford Taurus that I use with various ethanol-gasoline blends I bought a CNG-powered 2001 Dodge Ram 1500 van. I wanted a
Honda Civic CNG car but couldn’t get one, so I went online and found the van
(I’ll tell you more about why I couldn’t get the Honda in a minute).
I wanted a CNG vehicle for the same reason I bought the Taurus, I wanted to
do my own testing. I wanted to see if the good things I heard about CNG were
correct, and I wanted to see if the negative things I heard about CNG were
correct. As I mentioned a few times already, I like having firsthand knowledge
about stuff when it’s possible.
Funnily enough, many of the negative things I heard about CNG paralleled the
negative comments made about ethanol: Less energy content (the BTU nonsense), too many government subsidies, filling station availability is very limited,
it causes more pollution than gasoline, and it damages engines. Guess who
spread these rumors? Yes, the oil industry. They concocted a few others, such
as that it takes too long to fill the vehicle (we’ve had people write to us saying
that they heard it could take 30-minutes or longer to fill a CNG car at a commercial station).
Going back some years ago, before the oil industry realized there was big
money to be made by pushing CNG they were frightened by it the same way
they are about ethanol. To stave off government pressure the oil industry invented the Natural Gas Vehicle Association (NGVA) to pretend like they were
exploring alternative fuels. At the same time, the oil industry PR people started
to attach the negative comments mentioned above to CNG to play both ends
against the middle. In time, NGVA moved out of the API office building to give
it a little more distance, and Richard Kolodziej, the association’s president, was
given enough room to operate like he meant it – and I think he does a pretty
good job at it although I wish he was fully independent. Unfortunately, the oil
lobby never called off their PR dogs until rather recently, so the lies about CNG
continued and festered.
I can tell you from personal experience that all the negative comments are lies.
The issue over energy content is wrong (BTUs is just as irrelevant with CNG as
with ethanol). An engine optimized to run on CNG will get the same mileage as
if it was gasoline-optimized and using gasoline. My van gets virtually the same
