Of course money was spent. I'm talking about the INCREASE in amount spent and the things it is being spent on. The spending now is on dedicated vehicles and infrastructure to run them, not R&D or engineering. I can look out my car window and watch CNG fueled buses pass by on a routine basis.
I did a wee bit of Googling since this conversation started, and one thing that surprises me is marine usage. CNG ferries are in real-world use.
"Look up the range of a CNG Honda Civic vs a conventional Honda Civic. And note you give up the CNG’s trunk to have even that inferior range."
True enough, but temporary. You don't think that a Honda Civic designed from the ground up to run on CNG won't be "just a bit" different in tank design and placement? And auto usage will probably be the last thing to change over, if it doesn't turn out to be more practical to synthesize gasoline from methane.
And in the final analysis, once widespread infrastructure is in place it will be a matter of fueling up every 300 miles instead of every 400. As a Honda Civic owner, I doubt that the very minor inconvenience of more frequent stopping to fuel up will be a bother. I already stop more often than refueling to drain another liquid reservoir.
"Oil became oil for a reason. Physics. That doesn’t change."
Yup, but economics does. And it is economics that is and will continue to drive the change.
What?
It doesnt matter what day you design a tank? Ground up or later. It Doesn’t Have The Energy Density. There is nothing you can do about that. It doesn’t matter what economics says. It doesn’t matter that you live in a city and can’t understand overall.
None of that matters. Physics wins. That tank HAS to be a certain volume no matter what day you design it. That requires you give up your trunk — in order to have inferior range.
There is nothing new in this. There would be no CNG Civic at all if had not already been thought of. It will never . . . the N word . . . it will never transport food interstate. You need 300 horsepower trucks to do that. Trains all run on diesel to power an electric motor.
Look, it’s reality. Cattle cars . . . a phrase from yesteryear. You had to ship cattle live because until oil arrived there was insufficient power to push the train PLUS refrigeration. 60% of a steer’s mass is inedible. Only oil fixed that. CNG isn’t going to do it. Trains that get where they are going in 1 day will take a week for all the refuel stops, which won’t be made because there is no refueling station for CNG enroute and never will be until oil shuts off.
When it does, the people who might build stations will be out looking for food and not going to work.
There is no way around it. Oil is everything.