The Honda Civic model is the GX. And yes it is available in the US although it strictly runs on CNG. You can get a bi-fuel Cavalier or Contour, as well as a variety of trucks. I have seriously looked into getting one of these cars because I have a gas well on my property, but the Phill (home compressor) says it does not work with gas well gas because it has not been processed, dried and cleaned.

This forum http://www.cngchat.com/forum/index.php should answer any questions you might have.

Not to get too far up field, but it is fairly easy to convert NG into methanol which would seem more logical than growing corn to make ethanol which is actually a net energy deficit.

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1969 280 SEC
1982 300TD

The only reason you would need myphill is to pressure up a fuel tank from a 4psi, low volume gas line that homes have. If your gas well has enough pressure, you could connect it directly to the car. That said, you would not get as much pressure in the tank unless your well had extremely high wellhead pressure, and then you wouldn't want to mess with it anyway.

There are a lot of commercial compressors out there, but most are designed to move high volumes of gas into higher pressure sales lines rather than high pressure and the cost to operate them is significant.

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MB-less

It is my understanding that unless I dry the natural gas from my well, compressing it would cause condensation from any water vapor that is included in gas. It is also mostly odorless, which would be problematic if any leaks occured.

Nah, no problem! The big flash of flame and explosion sound will clue you in.

Your understanding is correct. "Natural gas" must be cleaned, dried and filtered before you can compress it for your use. Even from the treated gas pipeline it will need to be filtered for compression.

You can dry the gas with a glycol dehydration device, which is usually what is done by well operators before the put it in the pipeline. Wellhead gas may also contain a significant amount of condensate (oil), but that depends on the composition of the gas.

Natural gas does have an odor, its just not as pronounced as the stuff they put in a residential line and it might be hard to detect at low concentrations.

But the gas would run in the car. Before cars got fancy computers we used to run them on drip gas, which was a light liquid that came out of separators at the wellhead. It is basically natural gas drippings. Looks like water. You wouldn't put it in a good car. Illegal as hell for numerous reasons.

Nickname: ARCO SuperKnock.

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MB-less

The problem I saw with this was Range. It takes a mighty large tank to go 200 miles. Huge in fact. I got two of them here that were in cars and they filled up the entire trunk. And then refill was a issue. We finally converted these two cars back. It does make sense on inner city bus or something like those. They can carry a large tank and circle around locally back to the refill station.

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1983 300D-Turbo - Deep Blue w Palomino MB Tex (total loss in fire 1/5/09 RIP)
1995 E320 W124 Polar White/Grey Mushroom MB Tex
2005 F150 Supercrew - Arizona Beige - Lear topper
1985 Piaggio Vespa T5 - Black and Chrome

www.cphilip.com

CNG is the cheapest. LPG is more expensive. Somewhere I have a 2007 graph that we made comparing the cost of various alternative fuels in Diesel Equivalent Gallons and per BTU. I'll try to find and post it on Monday when I am back in the office.

In Europe, plenty of kits available for LPG (my father had several carburetted cars on LPG and dual fuel use - always worked fine as long as you switch occasionaly back to gas for a bit), but nobody does the home compressor charging of CNG that you see in in some places in CA. Home compressors are commercially available. The more expensive, the faster they charge.

Range is an issue. Methane has lower BTU value than propane, so you need more to get the range.

We did an analysis for a big rig trucking company in 2007 to see whether they should convert from diesel to CNG (yes, you read correctly - there are kits for converting diesel trucks to CNG spark ignition). Payback was several years or so with industrial scale compressors and tanks. Probably even better payback now than a year ago. Problem was that max power supported by the kits was about 325 hp and they needed 450hp.

Bert

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'70 111 280SE/c 3.5 (4 spd manual) - sold
'63 MGB
'73 MGBGT V8

I have a 2007 graph that we made comparing the cost of various alternative fuels in Diesel Equivalent Gallons and per BTU. I'll try to find and post it on Monday when I am back in the office.

[I] would love to see that comparrison. Thanks

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72 280SE His Majesty