Does anyone know if a steam locomotive can be converted to burn natural gas? With the rise in oil prices [:O], could a steam locomotive be set up to burn natural gas? I’ve seen alot converted to burn oil but wouldn’t natural gas be cheaper? Just food for thought today.[dinner]
Sure. You can convert a diesel to run on nat’l gas, too. But, the cost differential between oil and gas doesn’t hold up, historically. Nat’l gas is the current “darling” for electrical generation. it’s clean burning and lower in CO2 emissions than coal. That has driven the cost gap down in the past couple of decades.
A lot of the “live steam” 1/8 scale and such steam locomotives burn propane in stead of coal or oil. People like it because it is cheap, readily available, and idiot proof. While I’m not sure of the numbers, in my own experience, you can’t get nearly the heat out of a propane burner that you can out of either a coal or oil fire. This can make pulling heavy loads up long steep hills a little dicey.
As for a 1’:12" application, I don’t see it happening. For starters, I think the thought of having 10,000 gallons of propane or natural gas rolling behind a steam locomotive could be a major safety concern. I also don’t know how readily available such quantities of fuel would be around rail lines where the locomotives would be operating. Then you have the heat issue. In a small locomotive with a small firebox pulling small trains at low speeds, it might be ok, but I don’t think there is any way of getting enough BTUs out of a propane or natural gas burner to run a locomotive like the 844 or the 765.
Both 2816 and 2860 are burning diesel these days. The crews have found it burns almost as well as bunker oil, it is readily available in every engine terminal, and burns a little cleaner.
Didn’t BN or BNSF experiment with liquid natural gas Diesels? I thought they had an LNG tender and some Diesels modified to use that fuel.
In case you are wondering how a oil-injection engine without spark plugs runs on natural gas, they mixed the natural gas in with the intake air like with a carburetor, but they used a small amount of Diesel oil in the injectors as “spark plugs” to ignite the air-natural gas mixture in the cylinders without an electric spark plug like on your car motor.
This business of using natural gas as a transportation fuel has some controversy – as Don Oltmann points out it is prized for many other uses these days. But I still think natural gas is somewhat cheaper than oil because oil has gone through the stratosphere right now, and gas as (yet) to keep up.
Back in the 70’s a number of people got talked into converting their oil furnaces to gas because crude oil started going way up. But then the trend soon died out when they realized that gas only had about two-thirds of the energy content of oil.
A handful of amusement park steam engines (usually 4-4-0’s) ran on propane.
National gas? [8D]
Seriously though, trying to run diesel engines on natural gas defeats the purpose. Natural gas has a really low cetane number, which means it’s highly resistant to autoignition, which a diesel relies on; but since it has a high octane number (methane’s octane number is 120, propane’s octane number is around 100, just for two examples), it’d be highly suitable for gasoline engines.
All political, you ask me. When I see coal trains going to power plants, I feel confident insofar as the electrical generation being self-sufficient rather than dependent on other countries. Near me, the Martin’s Creek power plant closed down their two coal-burning generators; that means less business for the railroads, which I don’t like to hear.
My favorite steam locomotive fuel (that I’ve heard about) is sugar cane. I do wonder what the exhaust from that smelled like, or how dirty the firebox and flues might get from caramelized sugars from combustion of that fuel…? (Straw was used as fuel also, or so I recall hearing.)
Sure. You infuse a natural gas/air mixture in through the airbox and ignite it with a pilot of diesel. During the Grinstein era, BN had big plans to convert their SD40-2s to run with LNG tenders built by Air Products. My foggy memory seems to think that part of the conversion was new heads to reduce the compression ratio. I think the AAR might have had SwRI doing some leg work on the AAR’s test engines in San Antonio, too.
Biggest fleet of LP / LNG ‘diesels’ that I am aware of belonged to the Coors brewery in Golden CO. There SW’s were converted to run inside the warehouses.
BNSF 1200-1203 are MK1200G switchers built by MK Rail (now MPI) which are natural-gas fueled. 1202-1203 were originally UP 1298-1299. They are currently assigned to the Los Angeles Junction Ry.
I’ve seen bagasse-burning steam (they don’t burn the sugar cane. They burn what’s left after the cane is crushed and squeezed to get the sugary sap out of it.) The exhaust smelled rather like burning leaves. The funny part was the fuel arrangement - a little 0-6-0 saddle tanker pulling a large flat car with a haystack on it.
If someone could figure out how to isolate the flammable solids in garbage, someone else might figure out a way to fire a steam loco with it. I wonder what THAT would smell like!!!
Chuck
There are some real steam locomotives that do burn propane or something similar. Mostly, though, they are very small and/or newly build for amusement park service. The locomotive for the Old Hickory Railroad in Jackson, LA (maybe half an hour north of Baton Rouge) is a ca. 1960 Crown 4-4-0, 3 ft. gauge, that was built or converted to run this fuel.
It is not uncommon for the production companies to run Natural Gas in thier company vehicles. However, Natural gas in that for is kind of unstable, so they are at a pretty high risk of catching fire… Seen it happen a few times.
Our local transit agency has a pretty large fleet of CNG powered busses. They’ve toasted several over the past few years - actually closed a major interchanged at rush hour (I-85 at I-285) in fear that the CNG tanks might blow.
Um, no. Natural gas has the highest heating value of all fossil fuels. Natural gas has a heating value of 55.5 megajoules per kilogram, diesel has a heating value of 48 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline has a heating value of 46.4 megajoules, anthracite coal has a heating value of 33 megajoules, and bituminous has a heating value of 35 megajoules.
Yes, but Natural gas only produces that kind of energy per volume in a liquid form. You would have to be using LNG to “beat” diesel. How much more difficult/expensive would it be do use LNG over diesel? The know-how and burners for diesel are still out there, and diesel is closer to a “traditional” fuel over Natural gas.
IIRC the French Lick Scenic railway used to have a 2-6-0 that ran on something of this sort, although I’m not sure what the fuel was. When I visited, I poked around in the cab some, and in the tender was about 10-15 rusted out pressure vessles for some kind of pressurised gas. (Natural gas, propane, maybe even oil?) One of the older guys there remembered that the arangement did not work well, something about how it was too difficult to fill that many individual tanks, and that it did not steam well (Of course, that could have been an issue with the locomotive rather than the fuel).
It would make sense that they used many small tanks over one large one, since a custom-fabricated pressure-holding tank to fit the locomotive would have cost much more. This would still be an issue for a locomotive looking to convert to a pressurised fuel today.
Those are heating values per unit of mass, not volume. Kilogram is a unit of mass not volume.
LaurenFan,
Natural gas fired steam locomotives are an interesting thought problem!
Likely bottled tank cars could be used to pipe natural gas to a steam locomotive.
The question remains, is the research and developement needed to make such a fuel conversion both safe and practical. Further, is such research practical on this antique motive power technology that is not under current development. Even the Chinese who were the last to use the traditional railroad steam locomotive never went that direction and continued to use coal.
In America the coal and oil burning railroad steam locomotive was developed through years of research by major locomotive manufacturers of steam locomotives over several decades. The return to this and the redevelopment of this technology is just not possible today.
The oil firing conversion of steam locomotives required a special burner system to be developed that generated a flame front capable of heating the steam boiler firebox furnace sufficiently. When this was achieved the heat input into the boiler was greater than with coal burning locomotives and gave a serious thermal stress to the steels used in boiler and firebox construction. The change in fuels required a design review of the way in which the entire locomotive was constructed.
Many railroads like the Santa Fe had locomotives built in a series with both coal and oil fire versions of the same engines so they could compare the many complex issues that developed between the two fuels. This allowed a long term operational consideration to develop about which fuel was really all that practical. Other railroads never even considered fuel conversion and held it to be entirely impractical and were themselves glad to accept a slightly less efficient locomotive for simplicity of operation and for lower repair cost sake.
An addit
Yes, LNG and Natural gas have the same energy per measure of mass. However volume is more relevant since a steam locomotive’s fuel bunker has a limit of volume, not weight. LNG takes up 1600 times less space than “normal” natural gas, so it really is a no-brainer that LNG would be the better choice to test Natural gas as a fuel for a steam locmotive.
A bunker of LNG can produce more heat than a bunker of deisel. However, LNG currently costs more than deisel, and it is harder to get. We also know nothing about how LNG would preform in the varying conditions that are within a steam locomotive’s firebox, not to mention that crews are not familiar with it, and it is not a historically accurate fuel. I don’t think it would catch on for these reasons.
Even though I don’t think it is practical for full-scale use, I would still love to see how LNG would do! Since there aren’t any full scale engines out there using LNG, are there any live steamers out there that use it?
I’m not entirely sure of the energy density but for heating the tubes of steam boiler using a locomotive already converted to oil can be very possible using LPG (liquid propane gas). Propane doesn’t require cryogenically freezing like LNG (liquid natural gas) does but it does have lower energy density. I own a generator with a spark plug engine fired by LPG and from experience cooking with LPG is less hot than natural gas. By changing out the nozzles with those of the appropriate apeture for LPG and piping of the appropriate bottle pressure to get enough heat would be possible for LPG, but its lower BTU is a real concern.
The worry about LPG bottles used in transportation fuel applications is overblown–these are safe and proven. Similar for LNG, but LNG is much costlier than LPG. The worry about LPG tanker cars is a real concern but I can’t see anyone silly enough to actually plumb a tanker car for transportation fuel application.
Speaking of which, I believe the LNG-fueled diesel locomotive experiments are using something better than a regular tanker car that is certified for use as a transportation fuel source.
Oh, and then there’s the problem where propane often comes as a byproduct from the same source as other petroleum fuels and may not be as cheap as natural gas, even if the logistics of using natural gas as LNG is a more costly system.