Featured UPS investing $450 million more into CNG

EDIT: OK, OK, I originally missed the line about the gas coming from landfills, so I mostly retract my comments below. My mistake. Still, I’m a little concerned about dilution of these terms, so I’ll still air my misguided concerns below:

I’m good with this (CNG beats diesel), but why are they using “renewable” to describe CNG-powered vehicles?!

“Clean” might be appropriate, up to a point anyway, but CNG is not “renewable.”

Solar and wind are renewable resources. Biodiesel and (bio) ethanol are renewable resources. Natural gas, like coal, gasoline, and diesel, are extracted from wells; they are most definitely not renewable.

How soon before they start selling us “renewable” gasoline?!

 

Lol... What a joke... When you replace fuels derived from crude oil, with fuels derived from natural gas you decrease carbon and increase methane. You do absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse gases. Only thing you accomplish, quite literally is gas lighting everyone who is concerned about air pollution at scale:

The Literal Gaslighting That Helps America Avoid Acting on the Climate Crisis | The New Yorker

"...carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. The second most important contributor to climate change is methane—CH4. And, when you frack the countryside for natural gas to burn in power plants, lots of methane leaks out at every stage of the process, from drilling to combustion. So: less carbon dioxide, more methane."

 

Just think of all the renewable flatulence they can harvest from drivers...

Clean air indeed.

 

Is it just me or is it getting hot in here?

 

Partially agree, but not completely.

Each methane molecule you burn produces 1 CO2 molecule and 2 water molecules. So, twice as many molecules of water as molecules of CO2.

Gasoline of course contains a very wide variety of hydrocarbons, but speaking in rough numbers, they average somewhere around nonane C9H20. Burning one molecule of nonane produces 9 CO2 molecules and 10 water molecules. So, very approximately an equal number.

While water can, and does, function as a greenhouse gas, adding steam to the air is not going to raise global temperatures any appreciable amount; all it does is raise the relative humidity of the air in that particular area, after which it condenses harmlessly into liquid water. CO2, however, is going to say a gas, unless or until it undergoes a chemical process to, for example, acidify the oceans, which is arguably even worse.

Now of course you have to also factor in a comparison of how much heat energy is produced by burning each, but I think we’ll find that burning natural gas is considerably better for the environment.

That of course, plus their alleged-at-least goal is to burn landfill-generated methane, in which case they’re stopping that methane from going into the air, and allegedly not taking it from fossil sources.

 

Well yes... If you were producing natural gas and its methane by product in a lab under controlled circumstances. But true cost accounting in the real world of fossil fuel production via fracking means at every step in the production process you're leaking natural gas into the atmosphere on a massive scale and despite efforts to force frackers to capture and contain natural gas they've been able to get out from under all those rules and in some cases barely even use flaring to burn off the gas. One upside to methane over hydrocarbons is it's yummy food for microorganisms, especially in the ocean where they can eat huge amounts of it very quickly.

 

I think these are ultimately two largely-independent concerns. Methane being an even-more-powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, we definitely need to control such leaks. You’re certainly right about that.

However, gas and petroleum are going to be taken out of the ground no matter what we do. Nothing is going to stop that, like it or not, until it becomes just too hard to extract. These materials are just far too useful to not take advantage of! I’m not commenting as to whether this is good or bad, but just that it’s unstoppable.

The only things we have any chance of controlling is how much and which types of petroleum products we burn, vs. use to create plastics, fertilizers, medicines, synthetic motor oils, etc. — the modern world, in summary.

Unfortunately, attempting even to reduce burning of fossil fuels is hard, but we’re helping by buying efficient cars, reducing household energy consumption, and supporting legislation along such lines.

 

They said slaves would never be free and women would never have the right to vote too... More recently they said public school teachers living in poverty in West Virginia, Mississippi, California, Arizona would never be given a raise and would have to live in poverty, but you know what... They went on strike and brought the system to its knees and got their demands met. Likewise every Friday around the world indefinitely millions and millions of kids are marching in the streets to prove you and your ilk are dead wrong about the future of fossil fuels and a global general strike is what is going to happen, as well it's what it's going to take to nullify the agenda of misguided fossil fools like yourself.

 

And until yourself and others wake up to the fact that those alternatives already exist and are being rapidly developed and deployed with pricing equal to or less than fossil fuels, the resistance to rapidly addressing global air pollution issues will not weaken as quickly as it needs to...

 

Sounds like a good opportunity to share this tidbit again:

At least I'll know my packages exploded with renewable methane!

 

Such events are exceptionally rare, but apparently not rare enough...

In the rare cases where EVs catch fire, at least they don’t explode!

 

Alternatives to petroleum-based materials are actually easier to solve with a combination of extensive recycling + bio-based sources to make up the unusable materials.

For example, here's a list of bio-asphalt alternatives:


Cost is an issue, but if oil were priced to more accurately represent their costs to human health and the environment, these alternatives would be much more competitive.

 

That's not quite correct: Alternative Fuels Data Center: Renewable Hydrocarbon Biofuels

However, the only renewable drop-in replacement fuel that probably has a future is for jet fuel.

I do agree about not making perfect the enemy of the good. The issue I have with UPS's decision is that these are vehicles they are likely to continue using for 20-30 years. There is likely going to be many electric truck options long before this fleet of CNG trucks need replacing.

 

it’s called bio butanol

genetically modified organisms like algae may be able to directly convert power plant exhaust directly to biodiesel or bio butanol but the Russian developed organisms come with concerns of release into the environment