T. Boone Pickens Plan For Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs)
Billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens has a plan to reduce U.S. reliance on imported oil. His plan is to build fields of windmills across the Great Plains to generate electricity so that cleaner burning natural gas, which currently costs about $1.50 a gallon, and is used to power many electric plants, can be freed up for Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) automobiles. Windmills and a cleaner and cheaper fuel, sounds great, right? In fact it almost sounds too good to be true, which might explain why Boone is spending $58 million on an ad campaign pushing his “Pickens Plan” on TV, the internet and in town hall meetings where he touts that his plan would create thousands of new jobs, reduce foreign oil dependence and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But there may be a few problems, even assuming the Pickens Plan worked exactly as described, a shift to Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs) would not create a large number of jobs, if any. Some jobs would be created in the area of retrofitting filling stations with CNG capabilities; however, those job creations would be offset by the job losses at the CNG power plants. Additionally, any job creations in the manufacturing of NGVs would be offset by the loss of jobs in the manufacturing of other vehicle types. It looks like the only part of the Pickens Plan that offers any real job growth opportunity, would be due to the increased demand for windmills, which would result in a marginal (at best) addition to manufacturing jobs.
There could be much bigger problems with the Pickens Plan though; for example: windmills create more energy at night than they do during the day, but demand for energy is higher during the day. That means the power industry will have to keep the other power plants because they can be ramped up during the day or during non-windy periods to make up for the shortages in wind power. So there really is no way that the addition of the windmills would reduce current demand for CNG. This means the addition of NGVs would create an increase in demand for natural gas, thus resulting in a price increase for CNG in order to reach market equilibrium. Simultaneously, any NGVs that did sell would reduce demand for gasoline; thus resulting in a price decrease of gasoline. If the price of CNG is increasing and the price of gasoline decreasing, people will not switch to CNG, so demand for CNG vehicles will fall just after the initial buy-in. This reduction in demand for NGVs will result in a price drop to the point where it is no longer feasible to manufacture NGVs.
To make matters worse, while natural gas does burn approximately 30% cleaner than gasoline, CNG consists of 70-90% methane, 0-20% Ethane, Propane or Butane (combined), 8% Carbon Dioxide and up to 5% Hydrogen sulphide. The list reads like a who’s-who of the worst environmental chemicals. Even the most efficient internal combustion engines cannot fully combust 100% of the fuel they consume. In fact today’s high efficiency gas vehicles still spit out up to 8% of the fuel uncombusted. While combusted natural gas does produce less carbon dioxide and other pollutants, with methane being 22 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, the uncombusted methane alone makes a natural gas burning engine worse than a gasoline engine in terms of total effect of emissions on climate change.
So CNG is actually not such an environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline. It turns out there may be a different reason Pickens has been investing so much money and time into pushing for NGVs. You see, back in 1997 Pickens started a company that is now called Clean Energy Fuel and he is still the largest shareholder of the Seal Beach, a California company that builds natural gas filling stations for buses and fleet vehicles. If the Pickens Plan became a reality, his company is in a position to make hundreds of billions in retrofitting more than 100,000 gas stations to include CNG pumps, and in 2008 the company authored a proposition bill in California that would have made them the primary benefactor of $5 billion in bonds to promote CNG as an alternative to gasoline. The proposition failed by nearly 2 million votes.
Could the Pickens Plan be nothing more than a con to bilk taxpayers into lining Pickens’ pockets even farther than they already have? As Richard Holober, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California said: “This is an attempt to divert public money away from zero-emission vehicles to a dead-end technology that gets us nowhere.” The Pickens Plan isn’t all bad however; windmills are an ideal method of power generation, especially if coupled with Electric Vehicles (EVs) for transportation because windmills produce so much more power at night when most EVs would be plugged in to charge
.
Pickens plan
Pickens commercial
About the Author: SgtMaj is a contributing author at Green Earth Friend. He is also a Green Earth Friend Forum leader and moderator.
Beth | Jan 24, 2009 | Reply
OK, I’ll bite.
I was sort of in favor at looking at LNG for trucks, trains and heavy load bearing vehicles.
The idea that it would be used for passenger autos makes me nervous.
admin | Jan 24, 2009 | Reply
Yes Beth, I think it makes a lot of people nervous!
ed | Aug 6, 2009 | Reply
hello I am looking for informationa about methane,natural gas, and hydrogen engines.?