<p>I don’t know if I would blame the Koch bros but Pickens is clearly right that we do not have an energy policy that properly accounts for our abundance of nat gas. If we had cars running on nat gas we could gasoline for the equivalent of about $1.30 per gallon.</p>
<p>Bob Mann leans against his wife’s 2006 Volkswagen Jetta in his tool-packed garage. The mechanic and inventor has just converted the car, which is the color of a ripe crab apple, to run on natural gas. He shakes his head.</p>
<p>Commuters in the Boston area have snapped up his cars from Craigs*list as have CNG enthusiasts as far away as Wisconsin. Mann has also built a CNG race car and wants to design another to compete in the Indianapolis 500.</p>
<p>His big dream, though, is to create an affordable CNG home fueling station so that anyone who has access to a natural gas line for cooking or heating can also fill up a car, just as he and his wife do. Instead of paying $4 a gallon at the pump, it costs them 60 cents for the equivalent amount of natural gas.</p>
<p>Does Koch Industries use enough NG to affect the market much? I wouldn’t think so given what’s happened to pricing, even with the NG producers cutting production. I do think that the producers could ramp up production to much higher levels if the demand were there.</p>
<p>There have been NG discoveries in Europe too and they could desperately use it so that they aren’t reliant on Russia and the Eastern European pipelines for there natural gas. Development could also provide much-needed jobs there. I’d like to see more R&D money for NG transportation.</p>
<p>I also think it interesting that Apple is using a solar farm and Bloom Power fuel cell to power their new iCloud facility in North Carolina. Their fuel cell will be powered by methane gas from landfills. The fuel cell is about 5 MW. The solar farm is about 20 MW. Talk about a green facility!</p>
<p>That is a pipe(line) dream! You could get there by playing smoke and mirrors games with the full costs, and NOT accounting for the subsidies and other tax breaks. </p>
<p>In fact, a $1.30 is neither viable nor should be the objective. The objective should be to have a price point that deters the over-consumption of gasoline but at the same time provides plenty of incentives to develop better and newer technologies. To keep it simple, we should be paying more than 4 dollars per gallon, but a large share of it should be collected and distributed to companies that research and develope new technologies that will reenergize (pun intended) our decrepit transportation system. The incentives should be based on production and usage --not the silly R$D garbarge pursued by our national labs. Other incentives should be directed at consumers buying the “new” technologies. </p>
<p>Please note that this strategy does NOT include having the government getting a single penny in added taxes to be used outside the energy sector. This is the mistake the Europeans did as they got hooked on using gas taxes to cover their deficits and the funding of social services. </p>
<p>With our lower taxes on gasoline uses, we HAVE the option to avoid the 10 dollars per gallon costs, but we have to invest before it is too late. In other words, we have to spend more TODAY to avoid paying through the nose for generations. </p>
<p>By the way, it should also be noted that the consumers AND the industry respond to the high costs of gasoline. I recently rented a car in Europe that was fueled by a turbo-diesel engine that had a high torque and a nifty computer system that showed fuel use and recommended shifting. The result? I got WELL over 60 mpg despite plenty of use in cities. On the highways, I was getting upwards of 75 mpg at speeds of about 80 mph. All in all, I spent less per mile in Europe than I do in the US! </p>
<p>The irony? The car was made by Ford (Focus Hatchback) and was roomy and very comfortable. </p>
<p>What we should ask ourselves is WHY the automakers do not sell those cars here? The answer is that the US consumer still love his gas-guzzling monsters and hopes for elves (or the government) to find ways to maintain a lifestyle of over-consumption and financial ignorance.</p>
<p>PS Boone Pickens is nothing more than a profiteering charlatan.</p>
<p>As long as i am not driving a car similar to the Smart Car, i am ok with 60 mph…i’d rather drive a larger car,i feel safer…particularly on highways where the big rigs drive with reckless abandon</p>
<p>Pickens has controlling interest in the dominant (near-monopoly in some markets) CNG vehicle fuelling stations, with prices that trend upward in lockstep with gasoline prices. Definitely cheaper than gasoline, far cleaner burning, but without competition there’s little downward pressure on prices. </p>
<p>The infrastructure is a chicken/egg problem. If more people drive CNG vehicles, then there’s enough market demand for new stations. But there aren’t many stations, so people aren’t going to be interested in buying a CNG-fuelled vehicle, hence no demand for more stations. The federal government offers tax credits as a carrot for buying a CNG-only vehicle, but that’s not done much to goose demand. </p>
<p>Having a cheap home fuelling unit would go a long way to address the fuel supply issue, but it’s a hard nut to crack. Honda, which makes the only commercially available passenger CNG car, initially invested in a home fuelling unit, then yanked their support. That unit cost a few thousand, plus another couple thousand for installation, and had a limited lifetime. The fellow described in the article has his work cut out for him. :)</p>
<p>Fwiw, I also learned a LOT about how to save gas while driving. That little computer kept sending messages about switching gears. By paying attention to switching earlier, I got twenty percent more mileage. It was amazing to see the car move at 65 mph on the highway with the computer showing a use of a lot less than 1 gallon for 100 km (60 miles.)</p>
<p>As they say, YMMV but the differences were striking. Did I see a lot of F-150 or F-250 over there? Nope!</p>
<p>Does that in any way contradict my verdict of profiteering charlatan? Would you like snake-oil salesman any better? </p>
<p>Fwiw, el Chapo Guzman is also a self-made billionaire and donates enormous amounts to charitable causes. Actually he maintains entire villages and small cities. Escobar did the same in Colombia. </p>
<p>Buying yourself a conscience through charitable causes does not cleanse the nature of the profits. The crazy football fans at a small school in Okie-land might consider him godlike, but he surely is not. </p>
<p>But heck, Razor, I am not surprised you might like the dude!</p>