Ford F150 natural gas powered

[Harvey M. Taylor]

Dont know why the computer quit printing,but here is the 'rest of the story. and sealed the tank from releasing the propane. Here in Tx. we use butane in the summer and propane in the winter because butane freezes. Having gas and propane relieves you of being stranded without a source for butane. The carburetion for propane here in Tx. was about 600 plus the tank. In the car, I had a 30 gal. tank with the regular gas tank. If I wanted both, I w`ould not hesitate in having it installed , My opinion only, Max

[Brian Elfert]

The local fairgrounds converted a bunch of old vehicles with carbs to use natural gas around 1990. The conversion was sponsored by the natural gas suppliers so it cost the fair nothing. The mechanics liked the fact they no longer had carb problems with the vehicles.

The vehicles had less power with natural gas plus a ton of weight was added because they had at least six huge tanks for the CNG. It took 10 to 15 minutes to fuel the vehicles each time they needed fuel which was at least once during the day plus a fill up at night. When running on gasoline they could go all day on a tank of gasoline so the range was less. All in all, I would use natural gas for my vehicle if I could find stations that sold it and the extra cost was reasonable.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

David,

In the 60's, a major fertilizer company in Illinois was using propane in all their fleet pickup trucks that their salesmen used to drive out to the farms to interface with their customer. Using propane isn't an entirely new concept.

[Joe Angrisani]

.....and also the time required for that [refueling] operation.....

.....It took 10 to 15 minutes to fuel the vehicles each time they needed fuel which was at least once during the day plus a fill up at night....

As I understand it, this is one of the tripping points right now. It takes a long time to fuel a vehicle, especially commercial-sized stuff. The pumping facility is either faster and more expensive, or slower and lower cost and designed with overnight fueling in mind. Is this correct?

[Brian Elfert]

As I understand it, this is one of the tripping points right now. It takes a long time to fuel a vehicle, especially commercial-sized stuff. The pumping facility is either faster and more expensive, or slower and lower cost and designed with overnight fueling in mind. Is this correct?

The local natural gas supplier brought in a temporary fueling station for about three weeks each year. The compressor and fueling station was the size of a large pallet at least. There were about 25 tanks used to store already compressed gas to transfer to vehicles. The night mechanic fueled the vehicles every night plus the drivers usually had to fuel them once during the day. I estimate we got between 75 and 100 miles per fill, but you don't get very good MPG hauling two trailers of passengers between 5 and 15 MPH all day long.

A permanent filling station might have larger capacity to fill faster.

[Clarence Martin]

I ride the bus with a trader for a large gas company. In order for him to trade, he has to have a good understanding of pipeline, production, etc. He said that distribution is not in place to use gas as a motor fuel (that's pretty obvious, there's a lot of places, even in PA, where people heat with oil because there are no gas lines), BUT the production is available and then some, and distribution could be put in place relatively quickly if the vehicles were there to burn the gas. I guess it's a bit of a chicken and egg issue.

There is some pollution with the fracking. Theoretically there shouldn't be, but accidents happen in practice. That said, fracking has completely transformed this region and mostly for the better. It just happened so fast that I don't think the regulators have had a good handle on safety (for example, allowing waste water plants to treat frack water when they have no real ability to remove the majority of radioactivity in it, and where other water works' take their water from further down the river). I think the overall pollution has been less with fracked wells than it would've been with conventional, but that's lost sort of because there wouldn't have been all of these conventional wells. There are definitely winners and losers, and there have definitely been dishonest folks involved in some cases.

It's been a net positive, though, but it is hard on another line of business we have in this area - mining high quality bituminous coal. Our biggest local mining company spun off a gas company, though.

There is so much gas around here that production could probably be increased multiple times if needed, but the price is too low right now to do that. There are other layers that aren't fracked, too...yet.

I sure would love to burn local energy in my car.

The big problem with the fracking chemicals , is that the gas companies want to put trade secrets on the chemicals they use to frack the wells. Those chemicals have often been described as no more harmful than dish soap.LOL Up here, they want to send the fracking fluids off to the County water treatment plant to be discharged in the Niagara River, Lake Erie or Lake Ontario. The one water treatment faculity that was supposed to recieve the waste fluids, ended up rejecting it. They won't let the water treatment plants know what is in the fluids. There is no way that they can treat the water unless they know what chemicals to treat the water for, and because of trade secrets, they won't say what those chemicals are.

Then, there is the fact that up to 70% of the chemicals that they inject into the wells, stays in the wells, FOREVER! As we all know, concrete eventually cracks, either through age or from movement of the earth, ect. All those chemicals have to be eating away at the concrete casings as the years go by.

Also have to take into account what happens to the wells after they have used them up. Here, they pushed through a law that took out the DECOMISHIONING of the wells after they have used up all the commercially available gas. The gas companies turn the well over to the property owner to use whatever remaining gas is left in the wells for their own personal use. That us all well and good, but, The homeowners usally don't have the money to properly cap a used up gas well. That could take tens of thousands of dollars, and homeowners insurance will likley not cover the well decomishioning costs. Nor will they cover any contamination caused by leaks .


One thing I did find was the 60% rule for NY. That says that say you have for example, 10 property owners and six property owners wanted wells to be drilled. The remaining 4 property owners could be forced to join in to the drilling for the gas. Even if they did not want to have their property drilled, the gas company could drill right under those properties to get to the properties that would allow drilling. and let's say down the road, the property owners that did not want drilling on their land , at some future date decided that they wanted to drill their own private gas well.... Guess what, they won't have any gas to drill for because it will all have been taken on account of the 60% rule!!!

[Bob Rufener]

Natural gas could be a viable fuel except for the fact the infrastructure is not in place. The sad thing is, oil drillers in the Dakotas are burning off $100 million (yes million)dollars worth of natural gas every month. What a terrible waste of a natural resource. http://www.nbcnews.com/business/flar...ota-6C10798151

[Brian Elfert]

Natural gas could be a viable fuel except for the fact the infrastructure is not in place. The sad thing is, oil drillers in the Dakotas are burning off $100 million (yes million)dollars worth of natural gas every month. What a terrible waste of a natural resource. http://www.nbcnews.com/business/flar...ota-6C10798151

The issue is the lack of pipelines to get the gas to market. At $1.2 billion in losses a year you would think they could figure out how to build a pipeline. They have to be releasing a lot of pollutants by burning off all that gas.