Rahm Emanuel: Natural Gas Cars' Ally In The White House

Green Inc.:

But new hope for natural gas fuel interests may be on the way: When President-elect Barack Obama chose Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois to be his chief of staff, he chose one of Congress's biggest proponents of compressed natural gas cars.

Last summer Mr. Emanuel introduced legislation (PDF) that would mandate automakers to build 10 percent of their fleet with natural gas fueled vehicles by 2018. His bill also included tax credits and other incentives and mandates to spread natural gas pumps to filling stations across the country.

The bill has gone nowhere, but natural gas stalwarts have expressed optimism upon Mr. Emanuel's selection. Tom Price, a Chesapeake vice president, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying it "could be quite advantageous" having Mr. Emanuel at the president's side as one of his closest advisers.

Read the whole story: Green Inc.

Comments

[Keith52]

Correction, natural gas trucks and gov't vehicles. That would get us off to a good, quick start.

[chris2fer]

Bye bye big oil you screw us we screw you.

[Kache]

Converting cars to NG is not going to happen in any appreeciable way. The problem is not in converting the cars, but in piping the gas to a gazillion gas stations and retrofitting them. Lots of streets to be torn up, and tens of thousands of miles of new pipe lines.

However, convering the nations truck fleets could be done in less than 3 years. Trucking transportation accounts for 30% of out transportation fuel consumption. And trucks produce most of the particulate pollution. Conversions to NG from diesel are already available and well tested and used by government fleets. But most important, trucks don't fuel up and every convenience store in the contry, they fuel at company depots or truck stops. Supplying these relatively few outlets would be simple compare to convering every convenience store.

Converting the trucking industry was the very kernel of Boone Pickin's plan, but seemed to be overlooked by most people. It was the part of his multi-stage plan that made the most sense.

[research]

Pipe it to people homes, and co generate hot water and air for 90+% efficiency.

Plug in electric is probably the best for passenger cars.

NG is the only near term solution I see for trucks, agreed.

NG is also a great transition to hydrogen.

[kapo]

Kache, I agree with you on the conversion of the trucking fleet by creating gas refuelling corridors as China is already doing. This can also be accompanied by the conversion of the taxi fleet, as these vehicles would benefit the most from converting to a cheaper fuel. They could justify cost of the switch because they use fuel intensively. The problem is that leadership is needed to change the strategic direction. The present situation is not based on any free market but rather on a strategic decision to promote a transportation system based on cheap fuel, which made sense half a century ago based on experience gained in the previous half-century. There is now talk of changing direction, but only limited action in most countries. The global elites have still not absorbed the reality of the new situation we are faced with and green activists shouting doom have not really clarified the situation for Joe the Plumber. The reality is that natural gas is needed to serve as a bridging fuel for the world's transportation fleet before the ultimate switch, probably to electricity.

[GoVeg]

All these carbons from fossil fuels are barely contributing to global warming. The primary cause is meat. We need to focus on our main problem.

[research]

To transition to a fossil and nuke free world using solar and wind

to prevent another "Methane Extinction"

To prevent the release of Methane's 20 times stronger greenhouse effect than co2,

To make transition to hydrogen

All the major deposits of Methane should be used up.

[KillTheMessenger]

"All the major deposits of Methane should be used up."

Good luck covering millions of square miles with plastic foil and tubing.

:-)

[research]

Deposits, not generators like Cows, termites and decomposition.

Putting every cow in a methane space suit seems a little over the top.

[KillTheMessenger]

Yep, that one is going exactly nowhere...

[silqworm]

KTM probably is thinking that since natural gas produces CO2, that natural gas is not "green". It certainly is better than gasoline, and we can convert our existing cars and be off foreign oil in a few years, at A$3000 per conversion, 100,000,000 conversions would cost $300,000,000,000, which would be saved in the first year of avoided oil imports, dropping CO2 to targets. To replace gas power plant consumption, we would build an extra 200 GW wind for $300,000,000,000. Add $100,000,000,000 for national supergrid and solving the problem will cost the same as the banker bailout. Come to think of it, we should redirect the bailout money and get what was paid out already back, and this plan won't cost anything. It will pay for itself in a few years. By then we'll be buying mostly electric cars.

It's important that environmentalism not fall prey to scams such as "ozone hole" or "global warming". Ozone doesn't shield us from UV, oxygen molecules do, and we have 12 miles worth. It's true that CFCs can gobble ozone, but it's irrelevant, since it's not the ozone but the oxygen which captures the UV. Humanity has wasted trillions on this non-issue, and will might waste trillions more on "global warming" based on the same kind of reversal of cause and effect as with the 'ozone hole'.

[KillTheMessenger]

Wind power will not offset anywhere close to the amount of transportation fuels unless we increase efficiency three to five fold, which natural gas powered ICEs can not. Hybrids can get close (with a factor of two) but only electric cars can achieve the required efficiency to make the Pickens plan that you are "supporting" even close to realistic. Of course, in that case we won't need NG at all (or at most in power plants)... so the way to make it work is by simply bypassing that step altogether.

"Ozone doesn't shield us from UV, oxygen molecules do, and we have 12 miles worth."

Ozone happens to be oxygen, it's just O3 instead of O2... and we do not have 12 miles worth of it. The "thickness" of the earth's atmosphere (at constant normal pressure) is 8km or 5 miles. Only 20% of that is oxygen, which comes down to a mere 1 mile...

I am sorry silqworm, but your "science" is as poor as the rest of your argument.

[KillTheMessenger]

I am thinking a lot of things. Natural gas is relatively "green", but the time for a transition would have been 20 years ago when the technology became available and has been integrated into a non-trivial number of vehicles in Europe. Since then NG seems to have mostly caught on in developing countries where probably the economic pressure towards the cheapest possible fuel is the highest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle

In the US the only vehicles (with exception of buses) that I have seen personally were taxis (and they had a huge disadvantage because of the cut in half trunk space) and vehicles belonging to the government. To assume conversion of 100 million vehicles is nonsensical. In all likelihood realistic numbers will be on the order of a few million and those might be mostly special use and have their own gas station networks.

The savings, of course, will nowhere be near $300 billion a year because natural gas does not come for free and we are running out of cheap gas sources just as much as we are running out of cheap oil. So the economics will probably be a wash, most likely slightly worse. Certainly worse still than replacement of old vehicles with hybrids and higher efficiency vehicles.