An interview of the billionaire entrepreneur, T. Boone Pickens, by CNN’s Lou Dobbs revealed Pickens belief that despite all the other arguments for electric, hybrids, hydrogen, or ethanol powered cars, the fuel source that the United States also needs to consider is actually natural gas. Pickens’ argument is simple; there are 8 million cars worldwide that already run on natural gas, yet only 142,000 of them are in the United States. This differentiates it from technologies like electric, and hydrogen, in that natural gas is not a new technology, and absolutely no development needs to be done to get it to be a car transportation fuel.

The reason a change is needed to natural gas, is that 70 percent of America’s oil is imported. We are spending $700 billion every year on foreign oil, and in ten years or so we won’t be able to take it anymore, never mind the environmental impacts.

Pickens’ call for natural gas is mostly to the government, to quickly mandate that all government heavy duty equipment vehicles run on natural gas. This is actually not a very difficult task, seeing as a lot of these vehicles already have natural gas varieties. Vehicles that could fall in this category could be cranes and other types of construction equipment, as well as other large vehicles like auto shippers or car carriers. Changing passenger cars is not as easy, because it would be far too expensive and difficult to get many cars produced to run on natural gas. Think about the amount of pumps at the gas station! There would be the three standard varieties of gasoline, one for ethanol (or an ethanol gas mix like e85), one for diesel, one for hydrogen, one for natural gas, and even a plug for electric cars. With eight different choices, and six different fuel types, not only would there be confusion, but the market would ultimately go with whatever was the cheapest. If electric cars became more efficient very quickly and caught on with the masses, all the other fuel sources would essentially die out. The same would happen if hydrogen became the most popular, or any other one. This would leave gas stations with 7 extra pumps a few years in the future, and a great deal of money wasted.

This is why it is so difficult to introduce a new type of fuel other than gasoline; they all find resistance at every step. Car companies aren’t interested because it costs more to develop, consumers don’t understand it, gas stations don’t want to pay thousands for a pump with no customers, and people don’t want to buy a car if no gas stations can fuel it. It’s an endless cycle in a way, one that hopefully, natural gas, or better yet a cleaner form of energy, can hopefully break one day.