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0 pointsACCount371mo ago0 comments

Why?

CNG ICE vehicles exist, especially in parts of the world that have cheap natural gas and expensive gasoline - often as dual fuel retrofits.

They have to deal with high pressure tanks, but compared to the woes of hydrogen storage, that's downright benign.

0 comments

Good question.

It's just the physical properties of methane.

That's why they use high-pressure tanks because with low-pressure gas storage, the tank needs to be bigger than the car.

Energy density of methane is still lower than any other hydrocarbons.

Again: current day CNG ICEs don't actually have "fuel tanks bigger than the car".

That's because they use high-pressure tanks.

Actually higher working presure than regular welders' oxygen tanks.

Too bad the higher the pressure, the heavier the tank, especially steel.

I had a pretty good job offer from a company that was going to start building CNG tanks out of carbon fiber.

This was a few years before the failure of the Titan submersible.

CNG has made some progress since then, here's the kind of thing there is now:

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