Other creative opportunities being explored include natural gas pumps (hooked up to the home) to fuel natural gas vehicles, and light duty vehicles relying on fuel cells (which manufacturers hope to begin building by 2015).
What does a dirty-fuel player like Consol want with a clean-burning fuel like natural gas?
Methane(CH4) is both a fossil fuel(natural gas) AND a biofuel(biogas).
Methane is both a fossil fuel(natural gas) and a biofuel(biomethane).
On another energy-security front, Woolsey called on automakers to produce fuel-flex cars and for gas stations to offer motorists the choice of gasoline or methanol a liquid fuel made from natural gas to free American transportation from dependence on OPEC.
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However, once built, these plants do not require fuel, although they will be tied to natural gas fuel costs as gas plants are generally used to buffer the intermittency of wind production, not included in this discussion.
And again, the potential for natural gas as a transportation fuel, and the revolution in natural-gas production, undermine the economics of renewable motor fuels.
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Fuel cells convert hydrogen, natural gas or other fuel into electricity through an electrochemical process.
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The reason: Hydrogen engines can run on fuel derived from natural gas more cheaply than other currently available feedstocks.
Unlike other alternative fuel options, natural gas solutions are here right now.
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Second, nuclear reactors can only be run above maximum capacity for a short period before they begin experiencing complications, so each region maintains backup facilities to burn fuel oil or natural gas at peak periods or for when the nuclear reactors are offline.
There are about 14 million vehicles on the road worldwide that can run on natural gas most of them are bi-fuel, they can run on natural gas or petroleum at the flip of a switch.
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My (much smarter) brother Robert showed the House Natural Resources Committee on September 22 that federal subsidies related to fossil-fuel (mainly coal and natural gas) fired electricity are about 68 cents per million watts.
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Potentially through a carbon tax, it could create greater certainty in fuel pricing to make natural gas and renewables a better option than coal for power generation.
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First, all of these technologies are becoming less expensive each year with every prospect that one day they will be fully competitive on their own with existing fossil fuel plants or new natural gas plants.
Earlier this week, Honda produced the first commercial hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, which will rely on natural gas-derived hydrogen for fuel and will be leased for use in Los Angeles.
Today, economics, the U.S. shale gas reserves, advanced technology, and fuel economy and emissions standards are driving natural gas towards historic levels of market penetration.
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In the Northeast, the massive Marcellus Shale offers enough natural gas to fuel the U.S. for over a decade.
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In the meantime, the competitive landscape keeps shifting as alternative fuel sources, such as natural gas, keep popping up.
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Additionally, the pollution from oil and oil products when used as fuel is dramatically higher than natural gas, which would replace them.
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But Japan would end up paying a lot more to import liquefied natural gas to fuel those plants than for the coal burners.
Manufacturing is starting to return to the United States because of that low cost natural gas to fuel factories that make chemicals, fertilizer and such.
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In fact, the industry is investing billions of dollars a year of its own private capital to develop new methods to deploy natural gas to fuel cars and trucks.
In other words, there should be a cost for doing business and products that are critical for the economy should be regulated, such as electric, natural gas, fuel and health care, for starters.
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Although upgrading biogas to pipeline quality results in a fuel considerably more expensive than natural gas, biomethaneis starting to gain momentum in the U.S., particularly as a potential renewable fuel that can satisfy advanced biofuels mandates under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) and emerging Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS).
Eventually we will convert natural gas to diesel fuel, but that technology is probably ten years away.
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Japan and Germany must embrace natural gas as the fuel to replace recent losses of nuclear power.
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In the past few years, the U.S. power industry has increasingly replaced coal with natural gas as the fuel of choice.
Enron was then diversifying its energy business to emphasize natural gas, a fuel that was facing difficult market competition with coal.
The country aims to raise the contribution of natural gas to the fuel mix to 10% by 2020 from less than 5% today.
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