Fuel falsities

This is a great case when playing with numbers will get you something provably correct but inherently wrong.

The Boston Globe has an article today on "Phill," a device that takes your home's natural gas supply and uses it to refuel a CNG car. The backers point out that 95 percent of natural gas is produced domestically, so switching to CNG from gasoline would reduce our reliance on foreign oil. This is a good thing.

Phill and CNG cars, on the other hand, are not. Part of the problem is that CNG outlets are not commonly available; the Globe says there's about a dozen. The rest is that CNG conversions and home distribution are insanely expensive. Phill takes the natural gas available to most American homes and compresses it further; this is needed even in Lexington, home of the overpressurized gas lines.

To do that, Phill runs on electricity. A lot of electrity: In fact, some 800 watts, according to the Phill FAQ. I love this quote: " At 800 watts, Phill uses less electricity than most small kitchen appliances." That's nice, except I don't run my can opener for the four hours needed to refuel a car driven just 50 miles. (In fact, I don't have a power can opener. Mrs. Sheeple got used to a P-38.) At my power rates, four hours of Phill will add $0.235712 for each refueling. That doesn't sound like much, but it will add up. If you drive for 100,000 miles before getting rid of your car, it's another $471 just for the electricity to get you the gas. Let's keep playing with the numbers.

The Globe says the CNG Honda Civic costs about $4,500 more than the gasoline model. That's some serious sticker shock, and there may not yet be enough of a track record to say whether the CNG or gasoline model will require more maintenance than the other. Let's assume they're even.

Now, Phill itself costs about $3,400, with installation at $1,000, the Globe reports. Let's argue that Phill will last for 200,000 miles -- just a guess. That'd be maybe 15 years in the average house with back-to-back CNG vehicles, or two CNG cars in the same house for eight years. So we'll halve the per-car cost of Phil -- just a mere $2,200 each.

Going CNG so far is now up to $2,200 for Phill, $4,500 for the car, and $471 to power Phill.

Yet CNG model can save money, too. FuelEconomy.Gov estimates the CNG civic as using $587 a year in fuel to go 15,000 miles, and the several gas models to take $988. Lifetime fuel costs become $3,913.33 for the CNG version and $6,586.66 for the gas version. (The Globe article notes gas prices have been much higher lately, possibly due to hurricanes.)

So, total fueling costs for the gasoline: $6,586.66. For the CNG, costs total $3,913.33 + $2,200 + $4,500 + $471, or $11,084.33. It will cost you $4,500 more to own a CNG car, another 4 1/2 cents per mile, another $56 a month.

Now here's where the math makes little sense. An individual would have to be stupid, or greatly value something more than money, to opt for the CNG car. Chances are, other alternatives like hybrid cars, will have similar problems with big cash outlays for minor mileage savings, while bringing greater mechanical complexity. It's stupid to spend more like this.

It's stupid, that is, if you're a person. If you're a nation, it makes a great deal of sense. Witness this old story from the Guardian, featuring numbers pulled out of someone's ass:

The former energy minister said the cost of protecting Middle East oil supplies, paid predominantly by the US, were as high as $15-25 a barrel. But no amount of money could guarantee the security of oil supplies.

Oil isn't cheap, but the security and political problems are far greater. I'll even go so far as to argue that if oil mattered not at all to America, we'd have no interest in the Persian Gulf nations, we'd have no bases around to annoy people like Bin Laden that think we're on holy territory, and we would have had no Sept. 11. If the U.S. were really interested in human rights above all -- a claim made in Iraq -- we would have placed a far greater priority on the tragedies of the Sudan and Chad instead. That's only if we had no reliance on foreign oil, one heck of an if.

Instead, the United States is in Iraq. A cost of war calculator estimates Iraq at $243 billion so far. That's a lot of money to contribute security to a politically torn part of the world. It's also nearing $1,000 for every single man, woman and child, all of which is being mortgaged against the children's future via an increasing national debt.

In his State of the Union speech, Gov. George W. Bush proposed measures to reduce foreign oil reliance over the course of decades. The usual finger-pointing began: Bush was stealing other peoples' ideas, other people claimed Bush's ideas for their own, and some pointed to how energy researchers' jobs were cut and then just miraculously restored before Bush visited. STOP POINTING FINGERS.

It's time for a real national impetetus on this. It may be cheaper to the average American even in the short term to decrease gasoline demand via a massive gasoline tax increase, channeling the money into a permanent solution. Now, what's a good permanent solution? Natural gas supplies are indeed limited, and get particularly taxed in the winter. Why not look to the French?

Three-quarters of French elecricity comes from nuclear power plants, many of which use larger, standardized designs to reduce costs and improve efficiency. In the United States, a group of nuclear power plant operators is still trying to figure out how to go through the application process. Nuclear power plants take years to build.

Conservation will help in the short term. In the long term, it only makes sense to use domestic nuclear power plants, which can be used to fuel our cars via hydrogen fuel-cell or battery technologies. These two sentences could help chart the future stability and economy of America. Why wait?