World’s first natural gas-powered chopper makes its debut

June 25, 2009 by Dan Gibson · 1 Comment
Filed under: Natural Gas

I got this from Taylor Shinn at Chesapeake today. In case you haven’t been following, Orange County Choppers and Chesapeake Energy worked together to create the first Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) powered chopper. Well, Taylor pinged me to let me know the episode premieres tonight. Are you tuning in? I am. Thanks for the reminder Taylor and I owe you a call.

Tune in to American Chopper on TLC, Thursday, June 25, at 9/8c to watch the crew from OCC build the world’s first natural gas-powered chopper. Built to show America the promise of natural gas as a clean energy resource, and in conjunction with Chesapeake Energy’s 20th anniversary, the talented crew from the hit TV show American Chopper partnered with the company to build a natural gas-powered bike. The episode covers the bike’s production process as Paul Sr. and crew visit a drilling rig and learn how natural gas can power everything form a semitruck to a custom chopper.
See the bike in person. Follow the journey of the OCC natural gas chopper on Facebook and Twitter. It may be visiting your area soon.

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Tags: cars, motorcycle, vehicles

Orange County Choppers for the Natural Gas Motorheads out there

June 2, 2009 by Dan Gibson · 2 Comments
Filed under: Natural Gas

How did I miss this one? Apparently Orange County Choppers and Chesapeake Energy worked together to create the first Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) powered chopper. According to the video embedded below they have been working on the bike the past couple of months. The show dedicated to the construction of the bike is scheduled to air soon and they expect an audience of about nine million viewers.

Full disclosure. I’m not a bike person. The last time I was on any type of bike, it was a bike-cycle years ago when I was teaching my sons how to ride. Luckily, we found an area with no witnesses and they both turned into excellent bicyclists in spite of my instruction.

Still, it’s great to see natural gas used in this sort of way. We all know the benefits of natural gas as a transportation fuel but some believe the benefits should be directed toward larger fleets. While others make the argument that the benefits can be seen across all vehicles (and I guess that now includes choppers). Check out the Natural Gas Vehicles for America web site for lots more information on the subject.

Here’s another photo of the chopper.

I’m going to put in a call to Chesapeake to see if i can get some more information on the bike before the show airs. Bruce Kauffmann and Chris McGill, contributors to this blog, are both big motorcycle guys and immediately began pelting me with questions, including how much range would a bike running on CNG have. Motorcycles, because of their smaller gas tanks, obviously don’t have the same range as cars. That challenge would be magnified in a CNG chopper.

Chris actually took four weeks last summer and traveled 5,000+ miles on his bike visiting member companies and the media talking about natural gas. We did a story in the November issue of American Gas Magazine that’s a great read. Here’s a link to the pdf of Chris’s trip. It’s a decent size file so it might take a moment to download.

If you have any questions on the bike, leave them in the comments below and I’ll see what I can get out of the guy from Chesapeake when I speak with him.

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