Western Pennsylvania is a major producer of natural gas, which is seldom mentioned as a viable alternative for gasoline and diesel fuel despite being a premium motor fuel.

With the possible exception of needing to simply remove excess moisture, natural gas is good to go. It also is the least polluting of all the transportation fuels that have been used to date. Hydrogen does promise to do better from a pollution standpoint, but one has to carefully examine how it is produced.

Natural gas wells are widely distributed throughout most of Western Pennsylvania, scattered across farms and woodlands. In most of Indiana and Armstrong counties, for example, wells are separated by as little as 1,000 to 1,500 feet.

Often as part of the lease agreements between the company that produces these wells and the owner of the gas rights is the provision for the owner to use a specified amount of natural gas, free of charge. Typically, this amount is 200,000 cubic feet or 200 Mcf per year. This equates to about 1,400 gallons of gasoline equivalent (gge) per year.

A provision in my lease, which is quite typical, is that if I exceed my free gas allocation, then I would pay for the overrun at so-called wellhead price. This is the price the production company gets for gas put in the pipeline. Last year, the cost of my overrun gas was about $7 per Mcf or about $1 per gge.

In 2005, Pennsylvania produced about 25 percent the amount of energy from natural gas as from gasoline. But very little of it was used to move vehicles.

Attempts to promote natural gas or compressed natural gas as a motor fuel have been made from time to time, but it has never caught on to any significant extent. The possible, but very minor exception, has been the establishment of bus fleets that run on CNG in towns such as Indiana and State College.

Somehow, the cost for CNG delivered to individuals at public fill stations in Pennsylvania always has been roughly the same as for gasoline at the pump, so the added cost to own a vehicle designed to run on CNG has offered little or no payback.

The technology for running engines and motor vehicles safely on natural gas has been well worked out and has been used to a limited extent for more tan 50 years.

Pennsylvania lags far behind some states in doing anything with CNG. California, Arizona and New York are much further along. In those states, one can purchase a new Honda Civic GX, for example, that is dedicated to run on CNG and can be purchased with a home CNG fill appliance that uses household natural gas for overnight refueling. There appears to be no interest by Pennsylvania car dealerships in supplying these products.

Beginning in late 2005 I began buying bi-fuel vehicles at government auctions, and by April 2006 I owned three Chevy Cavaliers and one S-10 pickup. All have low mileage and cost me an average of $5,000. So far, we have had a trouble-free cumulative CNG usage of more than 80,000 miles.

I purchased a FuelMaker refueling appliance for $4,000 to compress the CNG to 3,600 psi. Before the natural gas enters this compressor, I clean it up by passing the low pressure (8 ounces) gas through a desiccation column that removes excess moisture and some of the hydrocarbons from the raw gas.

While the major U.S. auto companies are not currently offering CNG vehicles, companies such as IMPCO and ECO Fuel Systems Inc. do offer courses, systems and training for mechanics to learn how to install, operate and maintain systems they provide for converting new and used vehicles to run on CNG.

Closer to home, there seems to be much more activity in northeastern Ohio than in Pennsylvania. Randy Kaiser, who runs a construction company in Homeworth, Ohio, operates eight vehicles from a gas well on his property. He uses a natural gas compressor to fill a cascade storage system from which he can quick fill his vehicles.

Marc DeLuca, of DeLuca Fuel Products of Coshocton, Ohio, has converted several diesel farm tractors, stationary engines and pickup trucks to run on natural gas with diesel fuel, cutting diesel consumption by up to 75 percent.

Developments since I first began using CNG more than two years ago are now coming together to make it easier for more individuals to consider using natural gas to run their vehicles, farm tractors and stationary engines.