New reports indicate that there are 1.7 million natural gas vehicles (NGVs) in Iran which makes it the number two nation in the world. Iran has a total of 11 million vehicles, so that represents over 18 percent of all vehicles in Iran.
According to the NGV Journal, the other four of the top five NGV-powered nations are:
Pakistan (2.3 million)
Argentina (1.8 million)
Brazil (1.6 million)
India (935 thousand)
It is estimated there are 11.5 million NGVs worldwide. The U.S. has 250 million cars and light trucks but barely 130,000 of them are NGVs.
Because of international sanctions, Iran is a major exporter of crude oil, but has pervasive shortages of gasoline because of a lack of refining capacity.
T. Boone Pickens pointed out that “we have enough natural gas for all of our needs for well over 100 years. If Iran can figure out how to transition to NGVs, then the U.S. certainly can – especially for our national heavy truck fleet.”
Pickens has been promoting the “Pickens Plan” which calls for utilizing America’s vast natural gas reserves to power heavy trucks which cannot run on batteries. “In seven years,” Pickens has said, “we can reduce by half our dependence on OPEC oil.”
Pickens has stated in Congressional testimony and media interviews that “we continue to run a great national security risk because we import nearly two-thirds of the oil we need, a great deal of which comes from countries which are unfriendly, unstable, or both.”
— The Pickens Team