“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 38

delivery trucks and taxis (which might be bad candidates for CNG)—
they currently use 1.3 million barrels of oil every day. 47
But the equation is more complicated for ei cient cars and trucks
that don't rack up as many miles. A team of scholars at MIT recently did
a simple estimate. 48 h e typical U.S. vehicle clocks about twelve thou-
sand miles every year. If it costs $10,000 to convert a gasoline-based
car to run on natural gas (a representative cost today in the United
States) and fueling that car with methane is equivalent to saving $1.50
for every gallon of gasoline, it would take seventeen years of savings to
pay back the conversion cost, assuming that the car goes thirty miles on
a gallon of gasoline. 49 Even if drivers could save two dollars for every
gallon of gasoline they replaced (a likely outcome if oil prices remained
around a hundred dollars a barrel), it would take thirteen years to pay
back the cost of converting a car. 50 h

at remains far too long for the

typical consumer.
Indeed, even this may overstate how at ractive the proposition of
converting to CNG would be to buyers. Saving money now is worth
more to people than saving the same amount of money later—but
most savings from using a natural gas car show up only over time. If
you incorporate a rational treatment of that, it would take a staggering
twenty years for a CNG car buyer to break even. 51 And real consumers
appear to discount future savings far more deeply; the way they see the
world, a CNG car would never pay of , even if it were used forever. 52
A few things could change this equation. One possibility is signii -
cantly higher oil prices. Let's say oil reaches two hundred dollars a barrel
and stays near there. A consumer will now take only seven years to pay
of her up-front costs. 53 Of course, two hundred dollar oil will also spur
a move toward more fuel-ei cient cars and less driving, which erodes
these savings. If the typical car doubles in fuel ei ciency in response to
higher oil prices, it will take at least eighteen years to pay of the extra
cost of switching to natural gas.
A more promising possibility is a drop in the cost of buying a natural
gas vehicle in the i rst place. As of 2012, there were few options if you
wanted to buy a new natural gas car in the United States; your best bet
was a Honda GX, which cost $7,000 more than the gasoline-powered
equivalent. But it's a lot cheaper to buy a natural gas vehicle in Europe;