I don't even think they'll even rise 50% in the long term. Gasoline ICEs are trivially convertible to natural gas, of which the US has a darn near inexhaustible supply. Natural gas is cheaper even today, but not cheaper enough for drivers to bother. If gasoline is $6 and natural gas is $2 per equivalent gallon, people with longer commutes will reconsider. Current price in the US is between $0.79 and $1.50 per equivalent gallon btw.
CNG for consumer vehicles is really inconvenient. CNG tanks take a lot more volume than gasoline tanks, tanks are supposed to be inspected every 3 years, and they expire 20-30 years after manufacture (and the tanks may have been manufactured much earlier than your vehicle). Some fuel stations (notably, PG&E's) require proof of recent inspection. And, replacing the tanks when they expire isn't economically feasible, leaving you with a lump of coal.
Non-obviously, only about half of the price of filling up is for the natural gas, the other half is electricity cost to compress it to pressures way beyond the pipeline pressure. This makes home based filling impractical, and CNG filling stations are fairly sparse.
Source: In 2017, I _really_ wanted to get a CNG Crown Vic/Town Car for HOV access, part of which was planning for a purchase in Los Angeles and driving to the Bay Area, refueling on the way; with the limited range, and without access to PG&E stations, I'd need to go up the coast, because I wouldn't make it on the 5.
It's all matter of regulatory climate. In Poland, there are millions of cars driving on LPG every day. Most gas stations offer LPG in addition to gas and diesel fuel. Stations don't require any proof of inspection, and moreover most of them are self-serve. There are plenty of shops that will retrofit any car (even diesels!) for LPG for about $500-1000. This is just a mundane, everyday thing.
I owned an LPG-fueled car and it was really no different than gas-fueled one, other than more frequent need for refuel (I had a small tank installed where the spare tire used to be, and it only had around 100 miles of range).
Natural gas contains propane as one of it components, so it can be filtered out. You can also refine shorter chains of hydrocarbons in natural gas to make propane.
What you're describing are combined side effects of the lack of demand, and the current regulatory climate, which is particularly ridiculous in your state.
In the 90's (!) much of the taxi fleet (and a good number of trucks) in Moscow, Russia was powered by CNG. Everything worked fine, in spite of a much lower level of technological advancement. If gasoline were to permanently go to $6+/gal, and the industry was deregulated a little, you'd see CNG retrofits that cost sub $1K and last for the lifetime of the car in basically no time at all. All the tech has been in place for decades, it's just a matter of demand now.
> tanks are supposed to be inspected every 3 years, and they expire 20-30 years after manufacture (and the tanks may have been manufactured much earlier than your vehicle). Some fuel stations (notably, PG&E's) require proof of recent inspection. And, replacing the tanks when they expire isn't economically feasible, leaving you with a lump of coal.
wouldn't all of these problems be addressed more adequately by a larger potential customer base & supporting infrastructure? (e.g. annual car inspection==tank inspection, cost decreasing due to bigger market, etc)
The tank inspection is not a quick visual inspection. It’s take it out, empty it, fill and pressurize with water in a protective enclosure, measure the expansion strain, drain, dry, stamp the inspection date, reinstall, purge, and refill.
broader point still stands I think - if this was required of everyone every year, a secondary market like propane tanks for backyard grills, etc would probably emerge or it would be part of mfg warranties.
side note: no, I don't think market solves everything.
The efficiencies of scale switchover point is probably a lot closer to hand than you think. VW's ID.3 is already cheaper than all comparable gas models of the (outgoing) similar Golf, and just about all of the German auto manufacturers have been not-so-subtly saying that they expect that all of their EVs will be cheaper than their comparable models with other powertrains in the next couple years.
China has sub-$15k equivalent EVs today. Cheap EVs are certainly physically possible even with today's scales, and partly it's just the catch-22 perception hump of "EVs are only for early adopters and luxury cars" (for both consumers and manufacturers) keeping EVs from hitting some scale benchmarks to push them cheaper.
The used market still isn't showing a lot of EVs, but that seems to be that statistically most EV owners keep their cars for longer. That's an interesting statistic, that maybe points to reliability on one side, and a possibly very different replacement rate on the other side. Which is to say that the average EV first owner is currently keeping their vehicle for 7-10 years rather than the 4-5 year replacement rate that has been of typical of ICE vehicle sales. (If EV owners were only keeping their cars for 4-5 years, as you suggest of some hypothetical "HN bubble" that would be a lot more of them on the used car market, and in turn fewer complaints of the high cost of EVs. The long first life of an EV is also keeping the costs up and affecting depreciation rates.)
Could be. I'll believe it when I see a $15K well equipped EV with 150mi+ range, no subsidies, no "fuel savings", no bullshit. We aren't there yet, to put it mildly, and given that battery production capacity can't keep up with demand, it's unlikely that we'll get there in the near future. But CNG is doable today. Pipelines are already there, fuel production capacity is basically inexhaustible for all intents and purposes, and existing manufacturers could easily adapt existing models of cars to the new fuel while they keep using the same facilities, equipment, workers, and dealer network as before.
I'd love to get an EV one day, when the pricing is less nutty than it is today. But it has to be economically viable for me. Right now it's not.
That's actually far easier to do (if there's demand) than $15K EVs. For an auto manufacturer, very little cost: replace the gas tank with a CNG cylinder (cylinder can be manufactured cheaply if economies of scale are in place), use the piping able to withstand the pressure, use slightly different injectors. Done.
Batteries, perhaps, but it does not actually take very long to start up a cell production line (and other aspects, such as raw materials). If given the certainty of policy, accommodating regulators, and federal financing support, the lag between demand outstripping supply and new supply coming online may only be 2 or 3 years.
And for electricity, the utilities actually need the extra demand because of energy efficiency reducing lighting costs and distributed solar and subsidized wind providing occasional gluts. Since EVs can fairly easily be set to charge (most the time) on a schedule when electricity is most abundant, this is good for everyone.
Worldwide power consumption is 109 GWh/year, only 24 of which are for electricity. Oil is 31% of that (34 GWh/y), but only 4% for electricity (~1 GWh/y).
EDIT : Whoops, my bad, somehow forgot that we were talking about transportation, which is "only" a quarter of power use...
So you need to go from 24 to 24+(34-1)/4 = ~32 Gwh/year, a 33% increase, and you expect to be able to do that in 2-3 years ?!
(Napkin calculations, not taking into account various (in)efficiencies and intermittency issues, but the order of magnitude should be roughly this one...)
? Your energy units are weird. 109 Gigawatt-hours per year is just 12.4 Megawatts. Worldwide average primary energy consumption is 18 Terawatts, or 157,000,000 Gigawatt-hours/year (GWh/year). Electricity (which is higher usable energy than "primary energy) is about 3 Terawatts average globally, a lot more than 4%.
US average electricity is ~475 Gigawatts. But there's a huge difference between average electricity and nameplate capacity. Natural gas peaker plants have about a 200GW nameplate capacity in the US but only produce about 25GW average. If we ran just the peaker plants all-out, we'd generate an additional 175Gigawatts.
US gasoline consumption is about 400 million gallons per day. I drive a Volt, and typically I get about the same range in 10 kWh that I would in a single gallon (Model 3s do even better, however). So roughly speaking, We'd need about 4 TWh per day, or about 167 Gigawatts average extra. Technically, averaged over the year, then, our peaker plants would have enough extra capacity to produce enough electricity. But natural gas combined cycle plants would also generate about another 100GW if ran all-out. (None of this is terribly realistic as there will be local transmission constraints and weather-related demand spikes which the peaker plants are needed for, but it is instructive.)
However, it'd take a good 10-15 years to mostly turnover the whole gas car market in the US even with a revived "cash for clunkers" program, so the capacity expansion would have plenty of time to sort these things out. We can expand solar and wind over this time even while phasing out gas.
The main thing, however, is the battery production.
Blame Wikipedia('s sources) for the weird energy units.
(I didn't want to bother with conversion when most of the sources seem to be in Wh/year anyway...)
It's 4% of electricity coming from oil, sorry for the confusion.
(Hmm, I might have made another mistake here - eh, it's smaller than the uncertainty anyway...)
167/475 = 35%
Nice to see that the math seems to check out with your data too. The issue of intermittence would warrant whole books of studies, hard to do it properly in comments here...
While an individual vehicle is trivially convertible to natural gas - modifying enough of a countries fleet to make a measurable difference fast enough is a completely different matter. It is unlikely that more than a trivial fraction of a total nations vehicles could be converted in a single year unless a significant amount of contingency (training, facilities and parts) is established.
