Today presentations ended with an inspired talk by Tai Robinson of Intergalactic Hydrogen, a Salt Lake City Utah based company which has developed top notch conversion systems for the most available and economical fuel alternatives you can choose today.
I’ve always liked Tai’s approach in that he’s all about what’s going on right now – this isn’t about the future.
I’ve had the opportunity to interview and get to know Tai and he’s the real deal. He has so much knowledge on alternative fuel technology and talking to him he just openly shares it so fast you need to take notes to keep up. His first choice of fuel is Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) which is becoming more and more available at filling stations and is used among commercial fleets as well due mainly to the cost. The cost does vary quite a bit depending on the filling station and how close they are to the source of the CNG but in Salt Lake it costs as little as about $15 to take Tai’s Toyota Tacoma 500 miles!
CNG is also one of the cleanest fuels available delivering exhaust that is often cleaner than the ambient city air.
Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion about what is involved in converting a vehicle to run on CNG – there’s a lot involved that must be done in order to make it a safe vehicle but as long as the proper parts and procedures are followed CNG can be even safer that running a vehicle on gasoline. Due to the high cost of the tanks and other high pressure parts which are properly certified (there are some undue regulations that must be followed to keep these conversions legal) a conversion will usually cost at least $10,000 – but once completed the fuel costs more than make up for such an investment. Please be careful of scams that sell conversion kits for $1000 as these are always missing expensive parts and often lead people to unsafe self-installs – not worth wasting your time with. If you want to do it right – talk to Tai and he will give you real-world information – just don’t bother ordering one of those cool shirts on his website because he’s out of them and his webmaster hasn’t been helpful to remove them yet… (cool shirts though – hopefully he will make more 
You can learn about Tai’s CNG conversions as well as his work with Hydrogen fuel conversions and multi-fuel ethanol and biodiesel options by visiting his Natural Gas Conversion website at IntergalacticHydrogen.com – I’ve got an interview planned with Tai which I’ll post here once it’s edited…
Thanks for reading!
-Joshua
