I've been talking to my brother about cars being converted to natural gas. Natural gas would cost about $1.58 per gallon, you would be running on 130 octane and your would be running a lot cleaner.

Put with the gas tank, in with new delivery lines and some kind of injectors and a few extra miles to get the natural gas (if they won't let me pump at home), and I'll start racking up the miles again.

Any input would be appreciated. I do have an extra car to try it on.

 

Some of our bus fleets have been running CNG, supplied from the depot.
There is talk about converting cars to CNG here (Australia is a pretty heavy user of LPG) and there is also talk of home point refuelling. However, as you can imagine there are safety concerns with that, so legislation is being drawn up regarding safe distances, fittings in the gas systems etc.
I like the idea of being able to refill at home and getting the cars refuelled on one gas bill, but you can bet government will not be happy with the avoidance of road taxes and excises on fuels, so that's going to be the biggest hurdle!
The actual gas part in the car is easy enough, it will be very similar to an LPG system.

 

Many non-emergency city vehicles operate here in Dallas on CNG and have for years. Besides the taxation issues by Andrew, any reduction in revenues to the big oil companies would seem to be met with considerable resistance. I really have not studied the matter in depth, but what little I've read indicates currently, driving range is limited to approximately 100 miles. I believe that a result of not being able to adequately compress the gas further for whatever reasons.

 

Only 100 miles? That would not work for me. I drive 150+ sometimes every day. Heck, I might have to drive 15 miles one way just to fill up.

Keep the info coming...

 

Quite a few years ago I worked for the Department of Highways in our province. They tried to experiment with compressed natural gas with one dump truck and about 3 cars. None of them worked well. They had 3 or 4 heavy steel tanks in the trunk about the size and weight of an oxygen bottle each and were pressurized with 4,500 lbs of compressed natural gas. All the lines were stainless steel with special fittings that would leak regularly and would have to be repaired. Valves regularly leaked and had to be replaced as well. The conversion kits were made by Garotson and we had garotson himself fly up and show us how to set it up.... he couldn't make it work well either. There was only one filling station in a town of 80,000 people and even that is now gone as the filling pumps were over $100,000 each. Natural gas vehicles have been tried and just were not practical.

Russ

 

Russ, thats for the input. I'll keep checking around to see if anyone has done it successfully.