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How much space does one hundred and fifty trillion cubic feet take up? A lot? Bloody heaps? An oval the size of Tassie?

According to the boffins, that's the size of Australia's discovered natural gas reserves. And that's before you factor in the untapped reserves located at Parliament House, Canberra, ACT. And at the current rate of extraction, we won't see production peaking till 2030, and we possess less than 1.5 per cent of the global reserves of natural gas. So there's a lot of it about.

Australia consumes only around 1.5 trillion cubic feet of gas a year on the mundanities of life such as heating water, our houses, making things in our ever fewer factories, using it to help dig stuff out of the ground, and using it to generate electrical energy.

Now, before you run ahead and get all tangled up, let's just slow down here. Natural gas has a low calorific value and relative to petrol you need a lot more of it to travel the same distance, which mean bigger tanks to store it.

On the other hand it is relatively green when burned (so it doesn't carve ever-bigger craters into the ozone layer), and it is reasonably easy to move from place to place via pipelines. It's also superior to Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) because it doesn't need as much energy to cool it to liquefy it.

For larger vehicles such as buses that have depots (for refuelling/fuel storage) and plenty of under frame storage for the tanks, CNG makes perfect sense... So what about the family runabout?

According to figures Otto has uncovered on the Internet (so they must be right!), we could switch the entire vehicle fleet in Australia overnight off petrol and diesel and onto gas and we would have 34 years' worth of gas power just like that.

Which would have several effects. The oil companies would get grumpy unless they had the rights to develop and deliver the gas, and a small but meaningful slice of our national emissions would be nixed. We would be energy self-sufficient, our balance of payments would improve and our economy would be viewed more positively by the ratings agencies.

Er, oh yes, and at current prices, a litre equivalent of gas would be half the price of petrol. Hmmm, thought that might take your attention off the Olympics for a moment.

Bottom line is we have heaps of gas. It only takes a small amount of energy to compress it, and cars can run on it just as easily as they run on LPG. As you know, LPG derived from petrol is still responsible for emitting nasties into the atmosphere.

Bet you didn't know that there are quite a few car makers around the world with conversion kits for CNG, including GM's European arm, Opel. In fact, it wouldn't be hard to convert our homegrown cottage industry LPG converters into CNG converters.

In fact, again, you could postulate that this could be the saviour of the local car industry, if Ford, Holden and Toyota would deign to offer dedicated or bi-fuel CNG models. The V8 would be safe and cost half as much to run as a petrol model while retaining that magic carpet of torque we all love so much.

Okay, so back to reality. To make such a dream come true someone has to convince the Feds that this makes sense. They have to convince the industry it makes sense and at the same time, the Feds need to be assured that the excise and GST they load onto each litre of fuel wouldn't be depleted overnight.

So now dear listener you see why our dependence on fossil fuels is likely to remain for some time. The Feds have been earning a tidy little bonus in income in the past six months on the back of skyrocketing fuel prices courtesy of duty and GST. And as you well know, there's no job harder than prising a government away from a tax take, even if it does profess green-tinged credentials.

Oh, and another thing. It would take a long and very expensive public awareness campaign to turn the average Aussie motorist on to CNG. This is a given because so few Aussie car buyers have been game to give LPG conversions a go even though the price of petrol soared above $1.60 a litre in June, leaving around a whole dollar per litre price differential between petrol and LPG.

The fact that petrol has see-sawed back to $1.41 at the time of writing gives the sceptics even more heart because the conversion repayment period stretches out with every declining cent off the price of a litre of 91 RON dishwater.

There's also the irrational fear of refuelling with LPG that’s keeping mums and dads away from the autogas pump. And actually getting close to a pump (you'll notice every filling station has one, but few have two) can be time-consuming even before the slow fill rate, and then there's the smell; oh yes, my dear, it's a bit on the nose, alright.

There's also the tankage issue, where dual-fuel vehicles sacrifice luggage space by accommodating two tanks instead of just one (no matter that the boot is rarely filled to capacity that often in the course of the year). Lastly some harbour fears over warranty infringements on newer cars, or dodgy conversion on older cars.

The Feds seem to like LPG enough to offer a generous cash rebate on the installation of LPG systems into new cars or even older bangers, with up to $2000 on offer for a used car installation. If you're buying a brand spanking new Holden VE you can get a factory warranted dual fuel conversion and the $2000 rebate, while Ford customers get only $1000 back on a dedicated E-gas Falcon, and no ESP to boot. Their boot though is somewhat larger than the encumbered Commodore's.

Despite the recent petrol price hikes, Holden was forced to chop $1500 off the price of its LPG conversion in July 2008 in a bid to stimulate sales, which just proves how little real demand there is from fleets or private buyers for LPG (or for VE Commodores…). If you can't sell an LPG Big Aussie Six when petrol's $1.60 a litre, it does seem to indicate there's a high level of resistance to the concept. Even with LPG at under $0.60c a litre, LPG isn't a strong enough lure.

So the question is, can Australians get turned on to a resource like CNG that we have in sufficient quantities to last decades at current usage rates, before the advent of electric / hydrogen cars powered by renewable energy sources?

Change of the magnitude required is only possible with a firm guiding hand from government that actually delivers policy not photo ops. Even if a crisp, fresh policy slapped onto the doormat tomorrow morning at 8am, it would still take years to deliver the infrastructure necessary to provide suitable levels of refuelling to meet demand.

In the meantime, the fruits of the North West Shelf continue to slip offshore, and an opportunity for energy self-sufficiency goes begging. What will our grandchildren think when they get around to reviewing the energy history of the early part of the 21st century?

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