EPA, Gas Stoves!!

WTH, Grandmother cooked over gas to 98 years OLD, I have been around Fuel Fumes most of my adult life, BORN with Asthma and STILL do not require inhaler or drugs to control.  These people are off the Deep end or smoking some really bad Dope!!.

I have since moved this into Political side.

hmm.... wait till they ban propane BBQs !

 hmm... any regs on indoor propane forklifts ??

seems 'they' want to ban ALL gas powered devices ,force to buy ELECTRIC... so WHERE withe the electrons come from ???

Long time ago in the summer between 2nd and 3rd year of college, I worked in an assembly plant.  One job involved putting a hot stamp mark into a plastic molding.  After a while, the smell of that hot plastic would about make your stomach roll.  About the time you'd get sick of it and want to turn away for a fresh breath, the dang LPG fork truck would go by and puke in your face!

 

gee Dave , don't put REAL numbers on paper.....greenies don't want to know the TRUTH !!!

You sure got cheap rates !! For me, the reality is about 25c/kWh, so I'd be close to $1700 per month...just a small increase from the $130 (CDN ) I'm paying now.....

let's see 'them' ...lead by example and SHOW us their new electric stoves and fireplaces AND their new hydro bills !!

It's about control. If they have a rolling brown out or decide to shut the grid down: people with gas stoves still could cook food and eat. They even could warm up a room in freezing temp. People with gas stoves and generators are mucking up the liberals plans.

Any IC engine will run on methane, and the earliest, particularly well pumping engines, ran on methane that eminates from the well.  Both of my Fairbanks-Morse ZC-118 and ZC-208 were wellhead-gas runners, albeit they were much newer...

Older wellhead engines used a pretty cool pressure/flow regulator that ran on gravity and water... a inlet tube submerged into water or oil to a depth appropriate for engine's demand regulation- totally gravity operated... incredibly simple, and totally cool.

Now, in many places, much larger engines running on natural gas have been prime movers for irrigation, municipal water, electricity... all the way up to giant gas-blowing engines in the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel.  Minneapolis-Moline was a champion at gaseous fuel versions, and if you wanted to 'go big', Waukesha ruled the roost with their massive V10,12,14,16,18, 20, and 24 cylinder machines... they basically ran a diesel bottom end with special heads that lowered CR a smidgen and substituted a spark plug (or sometimes two, or four!) and dedicated coil on each cylinder.  Those Beth gas-blowing engines had something like EIGHT spark plugs on each end of a double-acting cylinder (yeah, they fired in BOTH directions!).  Really wild stuff, and if you go to the National Museum of Industrial History and talk to Mike, you might be able to twist his arm to take you over and show you the big blowing engines... DO IT!!!

Natural gas is primarily methane... and it's 'primarily', because the 'rest' of Natural Gas content is random hydrocarbons (a little propanes, hydrogen sulfide, etc) and some non-flammable gases... it's all stuff that comes from decomposing stuff under the soil.  There's a significant amount of water vapor in there too... and while it ain't particularly strong in comparison to propane, gasoline, diesel or bunker oil,  Any engine will BURN it... just gotta dial back the ignition, push up the compression, and boost the ignition energy by a metric ton.  It's good for around half the unit energy of gasoline... 2/3rds of a unit of propane.

Something that many might not realize, is that most landfills in the US have engines running 24/7 on methane.  They've also got perforated pickup tubes that run down deep into the landfill, and at the top there's big blowers that pull decomposition gasses out of the ground... they're there to help remove the large amounts of trapped flammables, because landfill fires are like coal-mine fires... just a little worse...  but in most cases, they 'extract' enough methane from the 'fill, to feed an engine... that powers the blowers.  Some landfills, and frequently, sewage treatment plants, have 'digesters'... vats that biochemically produce methane for running power units to generate electricity for whatever they can run... so... Powered by Pooh

Deere has been supplying an engine line specifically tailored for CNG fuel, to serve as prime mover in city busses and OTR trucks.  They're much more popular in the city route role, partially because both the running route, and the city infrastructure, are static... same situation every day, and the bus lots are usually not too difficult to get a city gas main big enough to feed a booster pump/chiller unit to get the NG up to liquid state for on-site refuling.  The other reason why they're popular in municipal vehicles, is because that customer base is on the public dole, they can bury the additional fuel infrastructure costs deep into the taxpayer's wallet and make it look 'clean energy'.  It may be less NOW, but two decades ago when the process was developed, the cost of the equivalent effective energy output was roughly 3.5x the delivered cost of buying diesel commercially.

The Deere CNG engines DO run nice though, and I'm certain that every OTHER engine manufacturer has studied not only the green/yellow, but all the M-M, Waukesha, Hercules, and Continental industrials of long ago, to glean out any lessons they could.