Re: LPG to NG

Posted by Hal/WA on February 08, 2004 at 00:33:10 from (216.64.132.180):

In Reply to: LPG to NG posted by J Willis on February 05, 2004 at 22:09:03:

Years ago in one of the gasoline shortage scares, the agency I was working for did an experiment converting a couple of the fleet cars to run on compressed natural gas. Those cars seemed to run OK, but were a bit down on power from similar gasoline models. The guys assigned to operate those cars complained about the fact that the fuel tanks took a great deal of the room in the trunks of the cars and yet the range of the vehicles was less than 100 miles on CNG, which caused them to have to fill the CNG tanks much more often than they would have had to with a gasoline fueled car, which wasted valuable time. They also could only fuel up at the gas company shop, as the equipment to compress and dispense the natural gas was very expensive. After about 6 months, the experiment was judged to be fairly impractical and the cars were stripped of the CNG equipment.

If a person had a source for free natural gas and could get the equipment to deal with compressing the natural gas, storing it and using it cheaply enough, it might make sense to try it in a tractor or other movable engines.

But natural gas: methane has a lot less energy potential than an equal volume of propane. I would think that the existing mechanism for using propane would have to be modified to add a lot higher volume of natural gas over what it now handles with propane. And of course you would need the proper pressure regulators to get the highly compressed natural gas pressure down to where the tractor could handle it efficiently and safely. All this sounds expensive and complex to me.

Propane or natural gas would have some advantages--they do have higher octane ratings than gasoline and would allow the use of higher compression ratios. And using a gaseous fuel cuts down on wear to the engine and much reduced contamination of the lubricating oil so in theory an engine should last longer. But at today's high propane prices, I doubt that I would ever convert any of my engines to run on propane.

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