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however. Researches at companies like 3M are developing lighter fuel tanks or
tanks that store natural gas at lower pressures.
There are few gas-powered cars available, which keeps costs high, and only
1,500 public fueling stations nationwide (only half of which are publicly access-
ible), according to the
Wall Street Journal
. But the economies of scale could build
over time, especially once people understand how much money they will save. A
comparable amount of natural gas can cost about half as much as gasoline, when it
is at $4 a gallon (as of this writing in mid-2013, average gas prices nationwide are
$3.78 per gallon, according to AAA).
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And there is the psychological hurdle. Many are afraid that natural gas will
cause their cars to explode. This is not likely. For combustion, oxygen would need
to mix with the methane in a gas tank and be ignited. CNG tanks are hardened
against rupture and designed to vent rather than burst into flames.
In countries that lack gasoline-refining infrastructure—such as Pakistan and
world's second-largest gas producer after the United States—Gazprom, the state-
owned energy monopoly, considers gas “a profitable core business” and is planning
to create “a vast natural gas market” for cars, the company said in a statement.
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Gazprom will be the exclusive supplier of natural gas for a new, green race-car
series, the Volkswagen Scirocco R-Cup.
Some global energy firms, like Royal Dutch Shell, have turned natural gas into
a low-sulfur diesel fuel that can be used in conventional cars and pumped at regular
filling stations—though the process is not cheap.
With the right policy incentives in place, however, gas-powered vehicles could
“increase the nation's energy security, decrease the susceptibility of the US eco-
nomy to recessions caused by oil-price shocks, and reduce greenhouse-gas emis-
sions,” writes Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy and economics at MIT.
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China generates about three-quarters of its electricity with coal-burning plants and
produces twice as many greenhouse gases as the United States does every year. As
the world's second-largest economy (after the United States), China increased its
coal-fired generating capacity by 50 gigawatts in 2012, roughly equivalent to sev-
