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Natural Gas: The Next Presidential Transportation Fad
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/27530/[font face=Times, Serif][font size=5]Natural Gas: The Next Presidential Transportation Fad[/font]
[font size=4]What comes after funding for fuel cells, biofuels, and electric cars? Why, support for natural gas vehicles, of course.[/font]
Kevin Bullis 01/26/2012
[font size=3]America’s presidents can’t make up their minds about how to reduce dependence on oil imports.
President Bush was a enthusiastic support of fuel cells, until he was an enthusiastic supporter of ethanol made from switchgrass. President Obama has come out strong for biofuels and electric cars, but he didn’t mention those in his State of the Union address this week. Now he wants researchers to invent new ways to use natural gas to power vehicles.
The hope is to create a market for natural gas, which is pouring from the ground in record amounts in the United States, and in turn driving down natural gas prices to levels not seen for 10 years.
It’s easy to use natural gas in internal combustion engines, but it’s hard to store much of it on board a car, so natural gas vehicles typically have a much shorter range than gasoline powered ones. The White House announced today that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) will announce a research competition for either improving natural gas powered vehicles, or developing a cheaper way to turn the gas into an energy dense liquid fuel. (The announcement referred to ARPA-E’s previous funding rounds as “competitions,” so it’s likely this will just be another funding round, not something like the DARPA challenge competition to develop autonomous vehicles.)
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4]What comes after funding for fuel cells, biofuels, and electric cars? Why, support for natural gas vehicles, of course.[/font]
Kevin Bullis 01/26/2012
[font size=3]America’s presidents can’t make up their minds about how to reduce dependence on oil imports.
President Bush was a enthusiastic support of fuel cells, until he was an enthusiastic supporter of ethanol made from switchgrass. President Obama has come out strong for biofuels and electric cars, but he didn’t mention those in his State of the Union address this week. Now he wants researchers to invent new ways to use natural gas to power vehicles.
The hope is to create a market for natural gas, which is pouring from the ground in record amounts in the United States, and in turn driving down natural gas prices to levels not seen for 10 years.
It’s easy to use natural gas in internal combustion engines, but it’s hard to store much of it on board a car, so natural gas vehicles typically have a much shorter range than gasoline powered ones. The White House announced today that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) will announce a research competition for either improving natural gas powered vehicles, or developing a cheaper way to turn the gas into an energy dense liquid fuel. (The announcement referred to ARPA-E’s previous funding rounds as “competitions,” so it’s likely this will just be another funding round, not something like the DARPA challenge competition to develop autonomous vehicles.)
…[/font][/font]
