Linked in the Dave Cohen article I posted today:
Chapter 17a: Peak Oil - Natural Gas Vehicles—how much can they reduce oil imports? | Forums at Chris Martenson$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')mployees who drive the small CNG cars have learned from unpleasant experience not to venture
onto a freeway with less than a half tank of gas. The gauge can plunge to “E” with alarming swiftness.
Stranded employees have no recourse but to call our garage for help. The garage cannot simply
send out a pickup with a gallon of gasoline, for they are not equipped to dispense CNG. They must
send a wrecker to tow the car to the fueling station. So it goes with CNG vehicles.
Long-haul truckers, whose livelihood depends on continual travel pulling full loads, do not want to
worry about making it to the next fueling station; few wreckers can tow a fully-loaded 18-wheeler. Nor
do truckers want to surrender 25% of precious cargo space to CNG tanks.
If our leaders are serious about displacing diesel fuel with natural gas, LNG is the logical direction for
future long-haul trucking. But LNG has its caveats. The existing LNG fueling stations scattered
around the country require highly-specialized, energy-intensive refrigeration and compression
equipment to chill the gas to -260 deg F and compress it to high pressure to liquefy it. But extensive expansion of LNG stations may not be economically feasible considering that the special equipment
might cost $1 million a pop(2). Most refueling stations take LNG deliveries by tanker truck. Truckers,
in turn, need insulated, high-pressure tanks on their rigs to maintain the temperature and pressure of
LNG. Rigs need roughly twice the tank volume to store LNG vs. diesel for the same driving range.