natural gas

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

kenpat

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 13, 2009
Posts
49
Location
Oakwood Tx
anyone looked into converting to natural gas, conpressed or liquid, cost to convert my ford 460, would it be possible to switch from one to the other ??
there are over 300 natural gas stations in the us and more to come...lets get busy and convert to the 1.89 per gallon natural gas....
 
John Hilley said:
Here is a link to LPG conversion. You can run dual fuel. I would think these kits could be adapted to LNG.

http://www.gotpropane.com/
LPG and LNG systems are very very much different.LNG convertions are exspensive and not practical because of range(poor) LNG fill up places are almost non existant and a 460 already has enough problem s with powering a big motor home and on LNG it looses over 20% power
 
i have a friend who is a diesel mechanic and he works at a large trucking company with over 2000 trucks. he was telling me that they are looking to covert their whole fleet to ng when they reorder their replacement fleet in 2015. i dont recall many ng filling stations in canada but if these big players are looking ahead to this they must have something coming down the pipe. kind of makes sense up here in canada where we have an abundance of natural gas flowing through the trans canada pipeling from out west. i guess they could just add filling stations all along the trans canada.
 
muskoka guy said:
i have a friend who is a diesel mechanic and he works at a large trucking company with over 2000 trucks. he was telling me that they are looking to covert their whole fleet to ng when they reorder their replacement fleet in 2015. i dont recall many ng filling stations in canada but if these big players are looking ahead to this they must have something coming down the pipe. kind of makes sense up here in canada where we have an abundance of natural gas flowing through the trans canada pipeling from out west. i guess they could just add filling stations all along the trans canada.
any transit or trucking companys that are localized it makes sence becasue of short distances traveled and localized fill station,.It will be a long long time before you see diesel powered LNG trucks on the highway with LNG fills all along the highway.Right now and as always LNG long range fuel tanks are too cumbersome and fill systems are too exspensive
 
i agree ticat. but i guess as the price of gas and diesel rises things that are not practical now can change. here in ontario almost every little town and every decent size town or city has natural gas piped to all the houses. so i suppose the infrastructure is basically in place, just need to fine tune it.  my comment to him was 15 or 20 years ago they were changing lots of trucks and cars over to propane and that experiment didn't seem to work to well with our Canadian winters.i know we have trouble with construction heaters staying going when the temperature hits 30 below Celsius. not many of them left now. he seems to insist this is the way of the future . 
 
In the Detroit, Michigan metro area I know of only 3 places that you can fill an NG tank.

A gas station (Marathon) on Schaeffer just north of the Fisher freeway

Another station out near Metro Airport (Alas never been there)

And if the side of your truck has the proper corporate logo... One company pump (The gas company... Naturally).

As for gasoline.. Accross from the Marathon is a BP. down the road is SHELL (not a station, the But the refirnery, Also the Marathon refinery and one other) and that's all within a couple blocks. It would be hard to drive a Mile on a primary road without finding a gas station.  And most of those sell Diesel as well.

That is the big problem with "Alternate fuels"  Finding places that actually can re-fuel you.  In time, this will be solved, but not yet.

For a fleet of LOCAL delivery vehicles.. The company pump concept works.. OH, one more place that pumps LNG is the Detroit Department of Transportation.. The drivers of the LNG buses get special training in what to do in the event of fire. It is not a nice fuel when it burns,, Propane is much nicer or so I'm told.. I've ridden those easiely identified buses (They look like trollies)
 
That is the big problem with "Alternate fuels"  Finding places that actually can re-fuel you.  In time, this will be solved, but not yet.

A little off-topic, but yesterday I was heading down I-5 towards Los Angeles and stopped for lunch at the large Petro truck plaza at the north end of the Grapevine.

Across the street I noticed 6 covered concrete stalls with a couple of cars parked there.  I went over to check it out and it was one of the new Tesla charging stations.  You plug in the charging cord to your Model S, go grab a snack or whatever at one of the surrounding restaurants, and in half an hour you have enough of a charge to go another 200 or so miles.

And the fuel's free - use of the highway charging stations is included in the cost of the car.
 
wasnt too long ago that albertas tar sands were considered far to expensive to ever be used to any capacity. tell that to the people  in fort mcmurray. half the country is out there mining it now. gold prices the same thing. when prices rise high enough it makes things possible that were not before. like i said my friend insists that the company he works for is looking to convert to ng. maybe were not that far off some of these alternative fuels, electric cars included as battery technology continues to improve.
 
And the fuel's free - use of the highway charging stations is included in the cost of the car.


Interesting!! Back home (Canada), the charging stations that I have seen and seen advertised  are activated by your credit card!!!!
 
Tesla is installing these charging stations along major highways just for their cars - they call them "Superchargers" and not only are Leafs and other EVs not welcome, but Tesla is using proprietary voltages and connectors so other makes of EVs can't connect to the charger.

But Tesla does supply adapters so their cars can also charge at regular public charging stations.

There are currently 6 of these charging stations in California, they plan to expand to 100 along "high density corridors" in the US by 2015.  The IPad sized display in the car has a GPS map mode that includes all nearby charging stations.

http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/09/tesla-unveils-solar-powered-charging-stations/

I find their claim of the charging stations being"solar powered" interesting - if you read the press release there's no hard figures on the size of the solar array, just some gobblygook claiming the average yearly solar grid input will offset the average annual consumption of a single car.  But more than one car will use the station - there's 6 charging slots and I suspect they'll be full most of the time.

Reminds me of a radio station in San Francisco that put a 15 Kw grid-tied solar array next to their 24 hour, 50 Kw transmitter, then loudly proclaimed they were "solar powered".
 
Lou Schneider said:
And the fuel's free - use of the highway charging stations is included in the cost of the car.

Well, I guess that one feature of a $100k car is free fuel. if you live near a charging station. How many years of free fuel would it take to get the cost down to a reasonably priced car? If you drive 12,000 miles per year and can get 30 MPG at an average of $3.25/gallon, you are only spending about $1,300 per year. But Motor Trend gave the Tesla S it's Car of the Year award; lots of nice features but it still is a $100k car.
 
dont think electric is going to cut it up here in canada when it 40 below. maybe in the city for very short runs but even in toronto they say the average commute to work is over 45 minutes. we could all drive golf carts for the summer.
 
The natural gas sold at "filling stations" is CNG ( compressed natural gas ) and is sold in gallons of gas equalivant. LNG is stored at I think -240*F but I do not work with the LNG group so I am not sure as to the temps. The natural gas company I work for is in the process of installing CNG stations company wide for company and public use.
 
I think one of the problems with natural gas is getting any decent driving range.  One of the local police departments will be replacing the natural gas vehicles the next time with gasolene veicles.  With NG, they have to stop and refuel every couple of hours. On one important car chase, the NG cars ran out of gas one aftr the other.
 

Latest posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
133,859
Posts
1,417,834
Members
139,466
Latest member
aprairieperson
Back
Top Bottom