Natural Gas and Diesel Engines

             The difference of the fuel difference of natural gas compared to diesel is staggering on many different levels. The fuel for example the stations themselves are expensive to build costing anywhere from 350 thousand to one million for the mechanical aspects of the station by itself. The reason the cost is so high is because of high demand for fast fueling or two hose island stations where fuel can be pumped the equivalent of eight gallons in less than three minutes. These fast fuel stations require large expensive compressors and high-pressure holding tanks. Brand new diesel stations are extremely cheap compared to natural gas stations. The advantage here is clearly diesel as there is already a bulletproof diesel fueling infrastructure in place in the US. There are roughly 121 thousand gas stations in the United States as of January 1st 2014, with about half of them that stock diesel fuel. This number is staggering considering there is only about 992 CNG stations in the United States and many of these are not even open to the public only to be used by private fleets. There is smaller number of LNG stations in the United States about 63 stations and most of them are clustered on the west coast of the united states in 7 states with over 11 states in the country that do not have LNG stations at all in the midwest alone. According to the government department of transportation website there is currently 164,000 miles of highways in the US which is only 1% of the paved roads in the country. With this huge amount of highways it is obvious why the 992 CNG stations that make up the CNG station infrastructure in the country is not enough to make wide use of CNG vehicles acceptable. Efforts are underway to greatly increase this number. The goal is not to have a fuel station on every corner like you see with many gas stations you just need to have them in the correct strategic locations. You dont need thousands of stations, you need hundreds in the right places and you can cover the majority of trucks - Andrew Littlefair (chief executive of Clean Energy).