“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 39

the natural gas version of the Volkswagen Passat, which can run on both
natural gas and normal gasoline, costs only $3,700 more than the pure
gasoline version. 54 Researchers aren't sure what explains the disparity,
but it makes a stunning dif erence: if natural gas vehicles in the United
States were to cost as lit le as they do in Europe (something that might
happen if U.S. markets for natural gas vehicles grew), a sensible U.S.
consumer could expect to break even at er only i ve years. 55 Even more
impressive, if oil prices doubled while natural gas prices stayed l at, the
payof time would fall to under three years.
A third big possibility is the potential to liquefy rather than compress
the natural gas. Liquefying natural gas, and using the resulting product
in a vehicle, is an expensive proposition; for this and other reasons, it
doesn't make sense for cars or light trucks. But many industry watchers
are becoming convinced that LNG could gain a big share of the market
for large long-haul trucks. Because those trucks log lots of miles, lower
fuel costs can pay of rapidly. And because many of them travel a fairly
small set of long-distance routes, it may be relatively easy to outi t those
routes with a network of LNG fueling stations.
h e last thing that could tilt the tables is government. Kapadia
made the numbers for his car work in part with tax credits from the
state of California that covered the extra cost of a CNG car. Without
them, the math would have been a lot tougher. He also got a spe-
cial sticker that let him drive in the HOV (high occupancy vehicle)
highway lane even if he was by himself. Governments might also help
bring down the cost of CNG vehicles by buying lots of them and
creating economies of scale; many suspect that CNG cars are cheaper
in Europe than America simply because the market in Europe is big-
ger. People have bat led i ercely over the costs and benei ts of govern-
ment intervention in all these dimensions. Most economists would
say that at least some involvement is warranted. Others, ranging from
environmentalists to libertarians, would disagree. It's a question we'll
return to in Chapter 5 of this topic.
h e other big prospect for get ing natural gas into cars and trucks is
converting it into a liquid fuel that could replace gasoline or diesel. In
Qatar, where natural gas is dirt-cheap to produce, Shell spent upward
of twenty billion to build a massive plant, called Pearl, that could turn