How about if you had a natural gas well and were looking into getting a compressor and converting your road vehicles and thought that it might make sense to convert you tractor as well?There is no positve benefit to using CNG vs diesel for a small tractor. First of all, where are you going to fll your tractor tank with compressed natural gas? You cant have it delivered like LPG. Maybe that is what you meant rather than CNG. LPG is cheaper than diesel per gallon, but it takes sooooo much more of it to produce the same power. NO WAY would I convert a diesel to LPG or CNG or any other fuel.
The compressor runs about 20 grand for a home unit with a storage tank, a little less if you want to pump directly to the tank in the vehicle. The tech I talked to said something in the 100 mile range for a typical Honda sedan setup and I personally can attest that a filled tank can run a forklift 6 to 8 hours straight of intense freight moving. Those are gasoline engines but I have talked to a diesel engineer and he tells me that they can absolutely be run on cng but he didn't know what kind of fuel usage to expect because it wasn't his area.You couldnt compress enough natural gas to get you away from the wellhead more than a few feet and you would need a very expensive compressor to do it with. Maybe if you had a free source of liquified natural gas it could be beneficial but you would have to burn a lot of it to ever break even on the conversion. You might could use a LPG gas injection system into the diesel engine to get more power, but then there are easier ways to get power from a diesel like turbo-chargers and intercoolers which would do the same thing for less money and lots less hassle with filling extra tanks.