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Central Eastern Europe GRIP 2017 |
9
NATURAL GAS AS A PERSPECTIVE FUEL
IN TRANSPORTATION
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Economic growth is associated with increased transportation demands.
However, due to urbanisation tendencies, metropolitan cities often suffer from
vehicular overcrowding and from the resulting harmful pollutants produced by
commercial diesel vehicles, especially when used in a stop-and-go mode.
Consequently, environmental legislation in Europe is also increasingly
demanding and stringent, which brings natural gas into focus as an alternative
transportation fuel. This could replace petrol and diesel while maintaining the
successful principle of combustion engines.
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Natural gas (NG) is more environmentally friendly than its counterparts (petro-
leum-based fuels) and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions and other air
pollutants (PM, NO
x
, etc.). Promoting the use of natural gas vehicles (NGVs
3)
)
is therefore considered to be one of the most important strategies towards sus-
tainable transportation.
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Over the last ten years, natural gas as a transportation fuel has experienced sig-
nificant success in terms of adoption in various countries around the world and
in the CEE region. That is because NG also offers apparent economic advantag-
es. Especially when diesel vehicles must meet stringent EURO 6/VI emissions
standards, their engines have become technically overcomplicated, which has
also resulted in a noticeable increase in investment and powertrain repair costs.
Thus, natural gas vehicles offer the lowest fuel costs, regular maintenance
costs, and lower powertrain repair costs compared to diesel vehicles, with only
slightly higher investment costs. Thus, the total costs of ownership of NGVs are
the lowest of any other alternative, if such vehicles are intensively used. The
economic advantage of NGVs may become even more pronounced with
expected future increases in crude oil prices.
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The European Commission is well aware of the environmental, economic, and
strategic advantages of using NG in transportation. Thus, the European
Commission has adopted legislation providing for the use of NG in transporta-
tion the necessary groundwork for its future development. For example, it
issued Directive 94/2014/EU on the deployment of alternative fuels infrastruc-
ture.
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The future expected increase in the usage of natural gas in the transportation
sector, as a low-emission greenhouse gas (GHG) fuel alternative, alerts TSOs to
facilitate the transmission of NG volumes used in transportation, to foster a
further extended gas supply in the CEE region, and to make another step to-
wards reaching EU climate targets in an efficient way.
3) A natural gas vehicle (NGV) is an alternative fuel vehicle that is fueled either by compressed natural gas (CNG) or
liquefied natural gas (LNG). The only difference between CNG and LNG is that the former is not liquefied; in other words,
they are stored in a different state of matter. However, the combustion engines of CNG and LNG vehicles do not differ, as
they both combust NG in the gaseous phase.