In a week Newman will have a finished product to fill up the six trucks he uses in his contracting business - all for about a buck a gallon.
The chemical, one part nitrogen to three parts hydrogen, stores a lot of energy: a gallon of it has about half the Btus as a gallon of diesel.
He buys gas in New Jersey because it's on his way to Albany, 170 miles each way, and the gas is about 30 cents a gallon cheaper, he said.
The EPA has the authority to revise the ethanol requirements, and if it did so tomorrow the price of gas would quickly fall by about five to 10 cents a gallon.
So why should anyone get excited about a mildly electrified luxury sedan that saves a few miles per gallon and carries a sticker price that can reach well into six figures with options?
And how makers of big cars and trucks will ever be able to convince drivers to feel anything but embarrassed about a vehicle that gets four miles per gallon is among their biggest challenges.
Every American adult gripes about the price of daily life, from a gallon of milk to a posh dinner.
It seems kind of crazy, because natural gas is about half the price of gasoline (on a per gallon basis) right now.
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For instance, he says he drives a Honda Odyssey minivan that gets about 24 miles per gallon.
"I mean, you are talking about saving a dollar and a half, two dollars a gallon and that's unheard of, " said Pickens, who, as an investor in Clean Energy, has a stake in the success of natural gas.
They now use about half as much water per gallon of ethanol as they did a decade ago.
Well that's a vehicle that, in our testing, got about 14 miles per gallon.
Its upcoming 2012 Veloster coupe weighs just 2, 584 pounds (400 pounds lighter than a Scion tC and about the same as a Mini hardtop) and will deliver 138 horsepower and get up to 40 miles per gallon with its little 1.6-liter gasoline direct-injection engine.
And trimming excess weight can have a dramatic effect: every 100lb (about 45kg) removed from a Ford Focus, for example, improves its fuel-economy by a full mile a gallon.
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