“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 37

h is idea of compressing or liquefying natural gas and using it to
power automobiles—Kapadia's car uses the i rst approach—has been
popularized by T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman turned alternative
energy promoter who has a lot of money riding on the success of
natural gas. h e Natural Resources Defense Council, a major environ-
mental group, estimates that his “Pickens Plan,” which focuses mainly
on using government to get compressed natural gas into trucks, “could
reduce oil consumption by 4.9 million barrels per day,” equivalent to
about a quarter of U.S. oil demand. 42
Cars and trucks that use compressed natural gas (CNG) are rela-
tively rare in the United States—roughly one hundred thousand are in
use—but they're more popular in a few pockets elsewhere. 43 One in
i ve Argentinean vehicles runs on natural gas; worldwide, more than ten
million are in use. h e vehicles use engines similar to those in typical
cars and trucks, but because natural gas is far less dense, even when
it's compressed, a tank can last only a quarter the distance of that in a
normal car. 44
h is is one reason natural gas vehicles aren't l ying of dealers' lots.
Another is infrastructure. “h e airport is on the way [between home
and work],” Kapadia told me. “h ere is a natural gas station on the
way.” Most people, though, aren't so lucky. “CNG is very inconvenient,”
he emphasized. “Very inconvenient. You have i ve i lling stations in
the entire Silicon Valley.” h at's actually a high count compared to
many parts of the country. As of July 2012, there were fewer than i ve
hundred publicly accessible natural gas i lling stations in the coun-
try, in contrast with more than a hundred thousand regular gasoline
stations. 45 South Dakota, West Virginia, and Maine did not have any
natural gas stations; Missouri and Iowa each had only one. 46 Building
out infrastructure will be a challenge: without it, people won't buy
CNG cars, but unless people are driving CNG cars, building i lling
stations for them won't be an at ractive way to make money.
h ere are, however, some big niches where range and frequent refu-
eling doesn't mat er much. Delivery trucks, urban buses, and garbage
trucks all tend to have bad gas mileage, run up lots of miles every year,
and frequently return to depots for a variety of reasons, at which point
they can also be refueled. Together with l eet vehicles—things like mail