Bob Brinker has been on a rant for months now that the solution to all our imported oil problems is to convert to using natural gas for cars, since the U.S. is drowning in domestic natural gas supplies. Let’s look at the numbers
The U.S. currently consumes about 20 million barrels day of oil, the largest portion of which is used in transportation – which includes airplanes, trucks, and trains. In 2008, we used about 132 billion gallons of gasoline.
Gasoline contains about 125,000 BTUs per gallon.
8 gallons of gasoline = 1000 cubic ft (mcf) of natural gas = 1M BTUs
1 mcf delivered to your residence costs about $13 at current rates (about $1.62/gallon if you assume the engines are equally efficient)
The total annual consumption of natural gas for all purposes is about 23 million million cubic feet, or the energy equivalent of 184 billion gallons of gasoline.
Known U.S. reserves of natural gas are around 800,000 billion cubic feet, or the energy equivalent of 5.6 trillion gallons of gasoline, which would last about 41 years if all gasoline consumption was switched to natural gas (and no new gas was found).
Natural gas gives off CO2 – it does nothing about so-called global warming.
Let me know if I dropped some zeroes…. 
Good math. I have an RV with a propane generator, and learned about the differing energy content of propane and NG. That is the reason for the smaller jets on a propane grill. NG is lower than even propane in energy content. However, the oil remains as clean as the day you put it in for a long time.
Any hydrocarbon burned is going to produce CO2. Nothing you can do about that – it defines combustion. So much for fixing the “global warmin”. If that is even real. (God bless Joe Bastardi!)
There are no free lunches when it comes to energy. I always wondered where we are going to get the energy to charge the “clean” hybrid cars. Nice clean coal powered electric plants? Maybe nuclear is the only rational decision. The operative word there is “rational”, so don’t count on that.
I was in the supermarket yesterday, and mentioned irradiated food to the cashier and bagger, and still got the reaction of… “OMG, that’ll cause cancer”.
We have a long way to go until we have achieved rational decision making in public policy.