School project...Methanol/Natural Gas, yes! you can use it.

[MEDIK418]

I think your freind is trying to use Methane for a fuel. Methanol is a polar solvent (alcohol),
That said. I guess natural gas could be used as a fuel in a car and has been in some developemental vehicles. Somebody around here a few years ago had a whole fleet of vehicles running on methane so yeah, it can be done. A lot of the irrigation engines you see along the roadways run on methane. It's cheap and if there's a pipeline nearby, plentiful. The problems with using methane for fuel in cars is the boiling point of the gas. To use it in a car, you have to liquify the gas in order to get enough in the tank to go past the end of the driveway. Methane has to be either cooled to -160 degrees (f) or compressed enough to raise the boiling point higher than ambient temperature. That done, you've changed it to a liquid. You can do it but, the pressures you have to maintain in the fuel tank are a bit high to be flying down the highway at 70 mph. This is the biggest reason you don't see tanker trucks carrying methane. It is safer and more economical to ship it through a high pressure pipeline. Add to the storage problems the fact that it doesn't make an engine run too well. Works great for irrigation engines but there's little power to be found in LPG's in general. Lots of folks around here use propane in their trucks and all I have talked to say there is a marked difference in power when they switch from gasoline to propane. Gallon for gallon, LPG's (although methane isn't classified as a liquified petroleum gas) are about half the cost of gasoline. Down side is, it uses about twice as much LPG to do the same work. It's cleaner burning but still.