From the department of Duh.

[jimbotr0n]

Was thinking about compressed natural gas powered vehicles the other day. How they're not common since there's not many places to fill them up. Cities and places like airports have filling stations for their fleets, and that makes sense. But what's a consumer to do if they can't fill up anywhere? Not buy a CNG vehicle, that's what

Comments

[jacklattie]

Could you mail that into the powers that be please?.... whoever they are....

[elviswannabe]

Having just done a big project on CNG (and other alt fuels), I have a surprising amount of semi-useless knowledge about it.

CNG refueling takes quite a while to compress gas off an uncompressed line. There are compressors available, but according to the gov they take an hour to compress 0.4 gallons of nat gas.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/fuels/natural_gas_refueling.html

Honda offers a CNG version of its Civic, which gets 24 city/36 hwy but doesn't store as much CNG as it does gas, so its range is actually lower than the gas version which gets 26 city/35 hwy. It burns cleaner, but at .4 gallons/hour, in a 10 hour period, that's only 4 gallons! It comes with the compressor for CNG.

There are some "fast fill" stations that store CNG (I don't know of any around here, but haven't looked either), but even those take 5-7 minutes to fill a 10 gallon tank... but I don't think that's not too much longer than regular gas.

[jimbotr0n]

Thanks for busting my CNG bubble.

BOOM!