JERRY FRIEDBURG ON HAROLD BATE

Harold Bate has made a great contribution to the world by publicizing the fact that you and I can operate our automobiles on low-emission fuel. His suggestion that we can actually produce one of those fuels—methane—from barnyard manure is also very exciting . . . but my experience leads me to believe that the famous patented Bate Autogas Convertor Device, designed to allow a standard automobile to run on methane, is not practical at all.

First, there's the problem of obtaining methane. The natural gas (which is mostly methane) companies I've contacted indicate that they're not yet set up to make their product readily available to automobiles. And, even equipped with Bate's instructions, not many of us have access to the manure (it takes five pounds to produce methane equivalent to one gallon of gasoline) and can spare the space and resources to build a digester-compressor.

Second, if you do succeed in obtaining or producing the gas, you'll find your car won't have much range unless you get a really strong tank and a compressor to force in lots of methane under pressure. Forget all talk of carrying the gas in balloons, bottles or whatever unless you plan to stay extremely close to your fuel source. At that, you won't be either safe or legal unless you've got the methane in a good, solid, pressed-steel tank equipped with excess-pressure relief valve, positive lock-off, etc. as required by law and common sense.

Third, instructions accompanying the Bate unit state that "gas pressure from the bottle (to the convertor) should not exceed approximately 70 pounds per square inch" . . . so if you intend to compress your methane for range, you'll need a regulator in the line between the gas tank and the Bate Convertor. As a matter of fact, because methane pressure varies noticeably with changes in outside temperature and fuel level and because the Bate Convertor is sensitive to these changes, you'll need a regulator to stabilize the gas pressure anyway.