West Virginia should really encourage development of technologies such as CNG in a Box.  It uses gas that would otherwise be wasted as flared gas to fuel vehicles that burn natural gas.  It’s quite obviously not an actual product yet, but man, it should be.

Let’s look at who wins with this.  1)  Consumers, since natural gas costs less than gasoline.  2) West Virginians, since we produce a huge amount of natural gas.  3) Car manufacturers, since they get to sell a new technology.  4) Environmentalists and producers, since gas that’s otherwise flared to the air gets put to use.  5) Environmentalists again, since clean-burning natural gas is used in place of dirtier gasoline.

The only losers are oil producers, but most of them are in the business of producing gas too, so maybe we can’t really list them as losers.  It’s probably a wash for them.

The trouble here is the old chicken/egg idea.  We need more natural gas cars to use the infrastructure, but we need more infrastructure for the natural gas cars.  Which do you build first?

The obvious answer is fleet vehicles, since companies and governments can eat the short-term costs and wait for the long-term savings.  But this technology looks like it would make it possible for gas stations to fire one of these things up at their normal site.  It might make it possible to build up the infrastructure first.