You proudly drive home your new CNG powered Obamacar, with a 200 atmosphere pressure bomb compressed methane tank. Over the next few years, you repeatedly cycle the pressure, filling and emptying the and temperature, with temperatures ranging between -30F and 120F.
Good thing that this sort of mechanical stress doesn’t affect the integrity of the metal tank, because you certainly wouldn’t want the neighborhood to explode when you get in an accident.
A number of people here are conflating CNG and LPG. Obama is talking about CNG, which requires 100X as much pressure as LPG.
LPG is safe, CNG isn’t – unless you have a tank with extremely thick walls – which is prohibitively expensive and heavy.
Thicker walls is a prerequisite anyway because of the higher pressure requirement. Whether CNG is economical for all types of vehicles or for the US market is a separate issue. In 2011 there were about 15 million CNG powered vehicles around the globe.
They are fleet cars used in cities. Not highway cars driving 75MPH with families inside. Obama wants to do away with gasoline cars.
Dad (a mechanical engineer) studied this very topic in the 1950s, and came to the same conclusion. He passed away in January after his 85th B-Day, disappointed that the none-of-the-below President won re-election.
And those lithium batteries are not ready for prime time. Just look at the Boeing 787 batteries and their short-circuit issues (extensive reporting by Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, among others).
And low energy density of batteries compared to gasoline will always be a problem, not to mention we’ll have to buy much of the lithium and rare earths from China and other countries.
They said the same thing about gasoline cars. That they were moving bombs waiting to explode. I suppose we have a few models where that was true, but largely it is not the case.
Gasoline is well below its boiling point. Methane is far above its boiling point. That is why methane rapidly disperses and explodes in contact with air, while gasoline burns.
Should I explain this about 200 more times?