Countries in the Middle East are switching the fuel for vehicle transportation from petroleum to natural gas.

Easy to do, solves air quality problems (as in Iran), no need to build refineries to make petrol/diesel to serve growing populations. In addition, producing more natural gas brings with it more condensate which has no OPEC quota. And, of course, not wasting valuable petroleum to run cars, buses and trucks means that even oil can be exported! No downsides at all. All cars, buses, trucks can run merrily on natural gas, no technical issues at all. New Delhi switched 115,000 taxis and buses to CNG in the space of 5 years between 2000 and 2005 and the air quality transformation is amazing. Germany is building 1000 CNG filling stations and most car major car makers now make CNG cars.

In 20 years time, Iran wil have clean, almost free energy for transportation.....US may be on fuel cells but the hydrogen will be made, you guessed it, from Middle East oil and gas!

Middle East countries are using a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars of extra income they are gaining from >$50/bbl oil to fund the development of fuel cells to maintain the US dependence on the fossil fuels found within 500 miles of Mecca! Must be the best strategic thinking coming from that part of the world since Alexander the Great.

Yup. The "proof" that PO is coming.. and they know it. I'm sure they'd laugh at America and the West, if we weren't so trigger happy and didn't view the entire Middle Eastern Oil Supply as a big red "bullseye".

predictable...

Irans new s finds have been mostly NG.

What about Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Egypt etc. that have just enough NG for COOKING and HEATING ( and even that will run out in 10 years)??

While it is nice to see less waste (instead of "Cook off"), one particularly well informed poster here "devil" has shown that NG is worse for "green house gases" than Benzine or Deisel.

BTW, what happens in a car crash if the natural gas "bombila" explodes on impact?

I thought LNG would be the fuel of the future for the USA? Will it be used by others?

It's probably safer than a conventional gasoline vehicle. It's the same amount of energy, but CNG is stored within a tough, armored container while the gasoline is not.

LNG has a great future, but its use is transporting gas to the US, Europe and the Asian growth markets. Then it gets converted back into natural gas for use in power generation, domestic use or transportation. The world is going mad for LNG at the moment with Korean and Japanese shipyards working flat out buildinmg LNG tankers.

Egypt has a lot of gas and is embracing CNG, Syria also has a lot of gas and the indian state gas company GAIL is helping them build a distribution network and introduce CNG. Israel also has found offshore gas. None of these countries have much oil, hence it makes sense to use the gas for transport. In many similar countries, the gas demand for heating is low because of the climate....using CNG for road transport means that it underpins the economics of the gas network.

In the west we have gas and electricity networks (the necessary infrastructure for CNG) and so its easy and low cost to introduce CNG, all we need are small compressors located at petrol stations.

In relation to global warming, CNG is miles better than petrol and diesel. For example, GM make an Astra 1.6 in CNG, petrol and diesel

CO2 emissions (in g/km)

CNG 125
Petrol 170
Diesel 159

These figures are based on tailpipe emissions...if you look at well to wheel CNG is much better because it does not cost much CO2 to make it compared to diesel.

Take a look at www.cng.cz shows, in english, the CNG vehicles available in the czek republic.

Obviously, big plus of CNG is also very low NOX and particulates compared to diesel

If you look only at CO2 emissions from the direct combustion of NG, yes, I would agree. If you look at the whole NG process from wellhead to output energy holistically, you would easily see that overall greenhouse gas emissions are higher than ANY fossil fuel energy producing process. It is probable, even, that a car running on NG will be the cause of more GHG emissions than a car where you would shovel coal into a boiler to produce steam to turn a triple expansion piston steam engine, if such existed today!

NG is the dirtiest fuel there is.

(See other posts by me for the maths)

[quote="Devil"]If you look only at CO2 emissions from the direct combustion of NG, yes, I would agree. If you look at the whole NG process from wellhead to output energy holistically, you would easily see that overall greenhouse gas emissions are higher than ANY fossil fuel energy producing process. /quote]

Devil - you're a bit of a devil aren't you? In relation to CNG and global warming, if you don't believe me that CNG can help save the planet, look at what the oil industry says.

European oil companies have an association called CONCAWE (www.concawe.com) that spent more than a year and a lot of money in producing a definitive "well-to-wheels" assessment of the impact of future automotive fuels and vehicles on the the global greenhouse gas and energy balance. To get it, visit the concawe website and go to the Fuels Quality and Emissions page. When you get the Well to Wheels study, you'll see the Exec Sumary says that:

"Natural gas as a motor vehicle fuel has a clear CO2 advantage over gasoline and is comparable to diesel today. In future, the advantage of natural gas vehicles is expected to surpass diesel. With 2010 technology, natural gas vehicles are projected to have 16% lower CO2 emissions compared with gasoline vehicles and 13% lower CO2 emissions compared with diesel vehicles. The inherently lower greenhouse gas intensity of natural gas vehicles could be further exploited by optimised engine technology and new concepts for heavy-duty engines"

And thats the oil industry saying that, its actually even better given that CNG utilises pressure in the well head from when the gas was originally formed in the time of the dinosaurs. As the high pressure gas comes out of the well head, often the very high pressure has to be reduced to get it into offshore pipelines. Reducing this pressure can be done via a turbine which generates electricity. This electricity can then be used to compress the gas at the high street CNG filling station.

http://www.mideastinfo.com/archive/cw/cw-egyptgas.htm

CURRENT levels of demand =Eectricity generation, heating and cooking.

NOT driving cars.

If you factor that in, there is ALOT LESS for any single use, or any period of time. As it is, demansd is not going to be kept at "Current levels" and is expected to grow, thus the EXPECTED SHORTFALL IN TEN YEARS. (without factoring in CARS/TRUCKS etc.)

There was a Haaretz article i posted a while ago that discussed Israel having to import RUSSIAN NG in 10 years to meet demand, and that's after the finds in Israel-gaza, Egypt, etc. They are NOT awash in NG given the populations and it's needs.

Also keep in mind that folks in Israel are already starting to change over cars to NG (illegaly), and they are not in any "bomb-proof" tank, just what is called in the region "Bombila's" (insert italian accent!) And they are sometimes used in their commercal "cooking gas" form for terrorists...guess why? They explode.

Sorry amigo, not every region will have enough NG to free up liquidus petrol for you. Them's the facts.




Yah the oil industry saving the planet, good one! does this liturature mention that NG LEAKS into the atmosphere before it get to point A?

I think Isreal has a lot more indiginous natural gas that it has oil....its not noted as an oil producer......when their gas starts to run out they will be introducing CNG for transport using piped CNG from either Egypt, Palestine or Turkey/Russia - cheaper, cleaner, more reliable than importing oil from Saudi or Iran.

You do make a good point re methane leaking to atmosphere, though the amount leaking out of welded steel pipes is negligible (for obvious reasons - would waste money and could cause injuries if it caught fire!).

Biogas from landfill sites is a source of methane that does leak away and damages the planet, so capturing that makes a lot of sense. Sweden is going big time for biogas because it represents negative CO2 emissions given that the methane would go to atmosphere anyway if you did not catch it and methane is 20 times worse than CO2 as global warming gas. Hence by capturing it (from household waste sites) and burning it, reduces global warming. Buses in Stockholm now all run on CNG from bio-gas.

A mid term (2015) production of biomass (wood) based SNG (synthetic natural gas) is also on the agenda in Sweden. As well as economic and air quality benefits, the swedish study also indicates that using biogas for transport, CO2 emissions could be reduced on a life cycle basis by between 65-85% on current fuels, depending on the feedstock used.

By 2020 the Swedish use of methane gas used in the automotive sector could reach 5% via biogas and another 10% via natural gas. In addition, SNG might by 2050 account for 40% of the Swedish needs within the automotive sector.

More information available at www.sgc.se/uk/index.asp

Why should I believe what an industry with a past history of blatant lying AND an enormous vested interest say? In reality, that's enough to make me suspicious.

IF, and it's a very big [if]IF[/B] pure methane could miraculously be tapped without any CO, CO2 or higher HCs and 100% of it could be delivered to the end user with zero emissions to the atmosphere (including transport) and then used with zero emissions of raw methane, then yes, I would agree with you. But I happen to live in a real world, without my head in a rarified atmosphere.

From your nickname, may I suggest that you are in the CNG industry. Would you care to declare your vested interests? I'll declare mine: I have none as I'm retired and have no stock in any energy-oriented company (it may be that I have shares in a bank that itself may have shares in energy companies amongst many others, but my holdings are too small for me to influence that). My only interest, and it is not vested, is that I consider that all forms of fossil fuel are a danger to existence of life on this planet and that NG is one of the worst by the simple fact that it has a high GWP and that the atmospheric composition is showing a far faster rise of methane than of CO2, because of human activities, including the exploitation of NG. I will say, however, that I was a consultant to the UNEP before I retired. Now, let's hear your interests.

I have at least 3 vested interests.

The first is that I own the UK's highest throughput CNG filling station, 35 trucks (each 380 bhp) fill there everyday and do around 6 million miles per year. The vehicles have dedicated gas engines, with a range of 550 miles between fills and the CNG is supplied at 250 bar. My customers produce much lower emissions of CO2, NOX and particulates than equivalent trucks on diesel. Lets be clear, burning methane still produces a lot of CO2 but it is less bad than burning diesel or petrol. The reason I referred to the oil company supported CONCAWE "well to wheel" report is that even they acknowledge that CNG is better than diesel as far as global warming is concerned and they generally hate CNG because they have only a marginal role in it. My CNG filling station and customers prove that there are no technical issues associated with introduction of CNG in a country that has gas and electricity grids.

The second vested interest is that I live 5 miles from Birmingham in England which is a heavily polluted city. One reason for such poor air quality is that buses in the UK get subsidised and very cheap diesel to encourage use of public transport - hence an epidemic of asthma which is affecting all 3 of my kids and makes me mad. It doen't cost much to get your kids to school by bus, but the buses are slowly poisoning them - I wish we lived on Cyprus as far as air quality is concerned! Most new buses in France, Spain, Germany and Italy are powered by CNG, not so in the UK which is the dirty diesel leader of Europe. Why do buses get cheap diesel? Maybe because BP and Shell are powerful UK companies which are both very much opposed to CNG as when a country runs its vehicles on CNG, their role is marginal.

The third is that I live on planet earth and can see that the use of natural gas for transportation is a low cost and easy thing to do. Biogas is especially a good thing as landfill gas (as well as grazing cows!) is a major cause of uncontrolled methane emissions into the atmosphere so burning it in vehicles gives a significant overall global warming benefit. CNG does help the planet a bit, both in reducing global warming emissions and eeking out oil supplies a bit more so they can be used for purposes such as making useful things such as CNG storage tanks. Clearly CNG is not the solution to peak oil or to global warming, but its a step in a more sensible direction and is a worthy thing to be involved in. Developing countries have recognised this, as has Germany which is building 1000 CNG stations, but UK and US seem to be blinded to the potential of CNG, instead relying on hydrogen made from water to solve all their problems.

A good friend of mine is CEO of a UK company that is building the worlds largest bio-diesel plant in the UK - it will produce 250,000 tonnes a year of bio-diesel and will be completed in next couple of months. My company is also getting involved in the development of renewable electricity which is also a fairly sensible thing to do.

Renewable electricity generation, CNG and bio-diesel are all things that can be done today which start the move away from 100% reliance on petroleum. None of them is transformational in itself, but a start. If I lose my money because my pockets are not as deep as BP and Shell then at least I will have lost it by investing in areas that are sensible as far as the planet is concerned. CNG is not that bad you know.

You mean thisreport?

It only shows CO2 emission increases. Read Devil's other posts to understand why we must measure more than CO2 to understand the problem of climate change. Released methane causes 35 times the global warming that CO2 does.

http://www.peakoil.com/author-Devil.html



So you want to trade visible, irritating carbon emissions for invisible, greater global warming causing ones?

Do you understand the Tragedy of the Commons and how that applies to this situation?



Certainly, we should do what we can to get these and prevent them from entering the atmosphere. However this does not mean that we should buy a bunch of new CNG cars. We cannot power the worlds car fleet on cow farts. If we begin to mine and tap natural gas for our vehicle fleet in response to peak oil, we will make our climate change problems worse. I believe that Devil does a good job of showing that.

He's old, cranky, and has no proclivity to get things wrong. Better start getting to the facts if you want to make claims with that guy. *grin*

Entropyfails wrote



The report is the CONCAWE one, but the Exxon presentation is a particular spin on it. I mean the actual report which you get from
http://ies.jrc.cec.eu.int/Well-to-wheel ... 115.0.html

Also, as the Swedes are proving bio-gas beats all other global warming reduction methods.

Some of the trucks that use my CNG filling station are duel fuel, 25% diesel, 75% CNG. These meet the Euro IV emissions standard for both diesel and methane - there is a tiny amount of unburnt methane from a natural gas engine, but a catalyst stops that getting into the air and its not that significant (thats why it gets a grant from UK Govt)

EF

I'm blushing