A whole different gas

“[I]t took about six years for truck fleets to shift from gasoline to diesel fuel in the early to mid-1970s.” (DC Velocity, quoting T.B. Pickens.) Huh. I didn’t know that ever happened. I didn’t realize that diesel hadn’t developed as a motor fuel right along with gasoline the whole way.

Trucks run practically everywhere in this country. But there are some long cross-country routes that some companies run every single day. There are, in general, national, regional, and local carriers. If it made operating sense, you could develop your natural gas network from the national routes on down to the more localized routes. Either the cost of LNG needs to go down, or the cost of diesel needs to go up; or a combination of both. Yet gas extractors have significantly slowed their operations in the Marcellus shale because they’ve driven the prices lower than they’d like.

Well – the price of diesel is bound to go up one of these days.

Not that I really want to see the tree-covered hills around here spiked with rigs. But on the whole, I think it is better for people to deal with the consequences of their actions. It is ethically more healthy to get your energy out of your own backyard.