Natural Gas as a Future Fuel for Heavy-Duty Vehicles

Abstract

In addition to their significant environmental impacts, medium-duty and heavy-duty (HD) vehicles are high volume fuel users. Development of such vehicles, which include transit buses, refuse trucks, and HD Class 6-8 trucks, that are fueled with natural gas is strategic to market introduction of natural gas vehicles (NGV). Over the past five years the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Heavy Vehicle Technologies (OHVT) has funded technological developments in NGV systems to support the growth of this sector in the highly competitive transportation market. The goals are to minimize emissions associated with NGV use, to improve on the economies of scale, and to continue supporting the testing and safety assessments of all new systems. This paper provides an overview of the status of major projects under a program supported by DOE/OHVT and managed by Brookhaven National Laboratory. The discussion focuses on the program's technical strategy in meeting specific goals proposed by the NGV industry and the government. Relevant projects include the development of low-cost fuel storage, fueling infrastructure, and HD vehicle applications.

Transfer of quarry dumps to gas under the conditions of the North

“…Liquefied gas is transported in special cryogenic tankssea tankers or tanks for land transport. This allows LNG to be delivered to areas that are far from gas pipelines and exported to any part of the world [17,19,21,22,24,25].…”

“…One of the ways to improve the economic and environmental situation in open pit mining is the use of alternative motor fuels. Natural gas is currently recognized as the only economically viable alternative fuel, which can be used as motor fuel without any processing [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”

Liquefied natural gas: Could it be a reliable option for road freight transport in the EU?

“…This technology uses the fuel pressure from the LNG storage tanks and a fuel pump to send high-pressure NG through dual-concentric needle injectors into cylinders along with a small amount of diesel to increase the cetane number that ignites the NG in a CI engine, without power restrictions [16,26,48]. During the past decade, the Westport HPDI technology has been tested in demonstration projects where drivers have reported that LNG trucks had as good as or better performance than diesel trucks [25,26,28,31]. In 2001, the technology achieved optimal results, but the high equipment costs precluded its commercial introduction [25].…”

LNG: an alternative fuel for road freight transport in Europe

“…Nevertheless, the LNG would be a good alternative for freight transport; Litzke and Wegrzyn [25] said that LNG could directly replace diesel for all types of trucks. Andress et al [26] stated that using LNG in road freight transport in the U.S. generates modest impacts on GHG reduction, but it can diversify the fuel used in HDVs, where diesel is used in almost 100% of trucks.…”