With all this natural gas, who needs oil?

Bob Mann leans against his wife's 2006 Volkswagen Jetta in his tool-packed garage. The mechanic and inventor has just converted the car, which is the color of a ripe crab apple, to run on natural gas. He shakes his head.

"It's a no-brainer. We could jump-start the economy overnight, put 100,000 people to work – easy – and help the environment," says Mr. Mann, a former Volkswagen technician who's as comfortable talking about global energy solutions as he is around a socket wrench.

From his suburban home in a wooded neighborhood once known for its shipbuilding prowess, Mann is crafting automotive gadgets for a future that many believe could help solve the nation's long-intractable energy woes – one fueled mostly by natural gas. During the past five years, Mann has converted more than 10 cars to run on compressed natural gas, in addition to gasoline, using a device he invented, the "CNG Fogger," which boosts the vehicles' mileage. Commuters in the Boston area have snapped up his cars from Craigs­list as have CNG enthusiasts as far away as Wisconsin. Mann has also built a CNG race car and wants to design another to compete in the Indianapolis 500.

His big dream, though, is to create an affordable CNG home fueling station so that anyone who has access to a natural gas line for cooking or heating can also fill up a car, just as he and his wife do. Instead of paying $4 a gallon at the pump, it costs them 60 cents for the equivalent amount of natural gas.

"My wife loves it – she's already saving $180 a month," he says. "What I don't understand is what we are doing sending billions of dollars overseas to buy oil when we've got a 100-year supply of natural gas right under our feet?"

Neither do many others. Natural gas has suddenly become almost everyone's favorite chassis for building an energy independent future. Many people on both sides of the drilling divide view the current abundance of the low-cost fuel as a "global game changer" – an energy source that will help wean the United States off Mideast oil, alter the nation's foreign policy, spur jobs and boost the economy, and reduce greenhouse gases.

President Obama has pledged to "take every possible action to safely develop this energy." Mitt Romney calls the domestic gas "a godsend." Energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, an early natural gas booster, contends it's "obvious" that Washington should enact policies to encourage natural gas production and use throughout the economy.

"Do we have to take advantage of this?" asks Mr. Pickens, with his characteristic Texas Panhandle pragmatism. "Well, if you don't, you're going to go down in history as the biggest fools that ever came to town."

Almost since the birth of the Industrial Age, Americans have fixated at one time or another on different answers to the country's energy needs. Oil has always been the constant, but the splitting of the atom led to talk of a nuclear-powered economy. Coal, because of its abundance, was once a king. In the 1970s, a roster of renewables – solar, geothermal, wind, waves – inspired visions of a post-Mideast, self-sufficient utopia.

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