Robert Zubrin shares with National Review Online readers one way the government could help pave the way — so to speak — for much more fuel-efficient motor vehicles. Here’s a hint: It doesn’t involve more stringent mandates.
President Obama wants new American cars to average 55 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025. But Americans could be getting a fuel economy of 140 mpg right now while sharply cutting air pollution as well, if only the Environmental Protection Agency would get out of the way.
The key is to lift the regulatory burden to allow cars and trucks to be converted so they can run on ultra-cheap fuels that are currently glutting the market.
Around the world, vast amounts of natural gas (made as a by-product of oil production) are being “flared”: What cannot be processed or sold is simply disposed of by burning, which releases emissions into the atmosphere. In North Dakota alone, 10 billion cubic feet of gas are being flared every month, so much so that seen from space at night, the rural Bakken area of North Dakota is brighter than Minneapolis. Globally, the amount of flaring is 50 times greater. This is a huge waste of energy resources, and represents a significant environmental problem as well.
In places such as the Bakken, the gas is very rich in natural-gas liquids (NGLs) such as propane, butane, pentane, and hexane. A number of companies, including Recapture Solutions, Gtuit, and my own Pioneer Energy, have developed equipment to gather the NGLs at the flare site and truck them off to the market. Even so, about 30 percent of the gas is still being wasted through flaring. In other locations, such as the Marcellus, the liquid fraction is too low to make gathering by mobile systems economical, so all the gas ends up going up in smoke. But such economics are determined by price. With a limited domestic market for NGLs, their price has crashed. If a broader market were opened, much more of our NGLs would end up being captured instead of flared.
