Sunday, July 29, 2007 Sun.star Essay: CNG in mind By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
WE were driving down south of Luzon one day on our way to Sorsogon when I heard a sound in my friend’s car. “You hear that?” I said. She was driving but she stole a glance at me and asked, “What is it trying to say?”
I don’t drive now but I was always the type who drove in sheer ignorance, like in a cartoon where a woman drives into a repair station. “What’s wrong with your car, lady?” the mechanic asked. “It goes tick, tick, tick left of the hood,” said the woman.
Women leave everything to the mechanic. Our car is in his hands. But even the mechanic doesn’t think in terms of environmental warming, he can’t talk to you about it.
And if we do know that we need natural gas now for vehicles, or biofuels, we haven’t realized much the threat to nature that will affect us, like cause the world to heat up and the ocean to rise, or even just to drown us with smog.
Women don’t completely get it when the talk is all about LPG and CNG or about Isuzu Hi-Lander 4JA-1, the vehicle on which natural gas (CNG) was used for the first time in our country. The fact is that the mother who drives out to take her children to school, to buy groceries, to look up the latest fashion in a favorite style shop, or to go to office, doesn’t have CNG and LPG in mind.
Environmentalists are talking about hope in natural gas, which the Philippines has enough of, if utilized. Then they talk quite above our heads with the mention of compressed gaseous state or liquefied state of natural gas.
Use of CNG, or compressed natural gas, can do much to reduce carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere. And we could use the natural gas to help heal the environment, hopefully to give a hand to prevent the unwanted effects of global warming.
The use of natural gas vehicles reduces air exhaust emissions of gasoline-powered vehicles---carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides reduced by more than 90 and 60 percent respectively, and carbon dioxide by 30 to 40 percent.
And to think that the country has natural gas in fields and coal beds! The largest source of fuel in the world, coal has other gases, so it undergoes a process so that what’s left in it is desirable methane gas CNG has 95 percent methane which burns clean, is low-cost, is even in good supply and “environmentally sensitive.”
Europe, Russia, South America, Australia and New Zealand, the US and Canada have been using NGVs, or natural gas vehicles, for six decades. Asia has just started to focus on the problem, forming the Asia Pacific Natural Gas Vehicles in the first workshop in 2003, hoping to develop a NGV industry in the region.
As it is in Europe and other Western countries, there are over a million NGVs on the road and thousands of refueling stations for them. Most of them are gasoline-powered vehicles with Natural Gas fuel components but this is expected to improve.
We need to go into that now, too, and sooner.
Here in the country, the DOE has come up with a vehicle that runs on natural gas. After all, natural gas deposits are rich and untapped in our seabed. The government is finally checking this up, so we could also go NVG style. The NGV has been road-tested in Isabela, Cagayan, Ifugao and Mountain Province. In Isabela, there’s the PNOC Gas Plant for the natural gas supply.
It was in 1980 that natural gas was first discovered in the country.
But the discovery of another source in Isabela gives us hope. It’s said that together with other natural gas areas, the country has enough power source which could lead to the beginnings of a Philippine natural gas industry.
The driving woman would surely lend a hand in letting nature flourish to a natural sparkle, and the world, a place safe to stay in.
