Green Daily

Natural gas as a transportation fuel is part and parcel of the Pickens Plan. Moving from imported diesel to domestic NG will keep hundreds of billions of dollars circulating within the US instead of building indoor ski slopes in Dubai.

As to the renewable part, Pickens held a town hall meeting for Congressional staffers last week which featured Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as the co-host.

This weekend, Pickens is speaking to a meeting of the Sierra Club (which has been supportive since the get-go).

Finally, Pickens met with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and serveral senior Committee chairs to discuss the tax aspects of renewables which should be included in the stimulus package.

Pickens, it seems to me, is doing his part by moving the ENTIRE Plan forward.

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Pickens' plan is a confused, ill-informed jumble.

Natural gas is a flawed and inconvenient vehicle fuel, being a GAS at normal temperature and pressure. You have to cryogenically liquify it or compress it (explosion risk, heavyweight containers). Transporting it is thus very expensive, which is why oil wells in remote locations routinely "flare" their NG rather than bothering to capture it.

The one upside is that NG can be made into methanol, an excellent, economical vehicle fuel that is far cleaner burning than gasoline - no smoke, not soot, no particulate matter, etc etc.

And fully flex fueled cars can run on methanol, ethanol, or gasoline, meaning buyers don't have to fear running low while out of range of their exotic alt-fuel. They can if they have to fill up on unleaded as usual.

Not an option with NG, which greatly complicates any realistic and affordable transition plan.

As for wind, ultra expensive, landscape cluttering, loud, and impractical, forget it.

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I believe the natural gas will work for passenger cars and light trucks. I dont believe natural gas will work on big trucks. You can run 200,000+ miles on a diesel before it needs repair. I might be wrong but I dont believe you can do that on natural gas engine. I think you would have a hard sell to the trucking industry. Diesel engines create a lot of torque. You got to have that to pull the 40,000 to 70,000 LBS. down the road. Here in Texas we have a lot of state owned vehicles running on natural gas and they seem to operate well. I think the state had a mandate for a certain % of state owned vehicles to run on natural gas.

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