LNG Fuelling Station in Spain Officially Inaugurated

The head of the Government of Álava, Javier de Andrés, accompanied by the Mayor of Nanclares de la Oca, José Javier Martínez, and the head of Mobility Solutions at GAS NATURAL FENOSA, José Ramón Freire, today inaugurated Spain’s first liquefied natural gas fuelling station for road freight.

The station consists of a 60 m3 deposit with a fuelling capacity of up to 200 liquefied natural gas (LNG) lorries per day, and also has a double supply point of compressed natural gas (CNG) with the capacity to refuel up to 600 vehicles a day.

This service station will initially be used by the transport services company Eurocam. Also, thanks to its convenient location on the A-1 motorway, it will be able to supply Spanish and international long-haul transport fleets. In the future it could also supply fleets of municipal buses.

European road freight transport corridor

The opening of this refuelling station forms part of the European project GARneT (Gas as an Alternative for Road Transport) which, promoted by GAS NATURAL FENOSA, will create a network of liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply stations serving long-haul vehicles using this fuel.

The GARneT project is designed to analyse the best technological and economic options for developing a large network of LNG supply points. With a total budget of 3.8 million euros, the project received 1.9 million euros of funding from the Trans-European Transport Network Executive Agency (TEN-T EA).

In order to carry out the study and validate the results of the GARneT project, seven LNG service stations, four fixed and three mobile, will be set up in Spain to test the technologies with the greatest potential for roll-out on a European level. The integration of communication technologies for the supply of large volumes of LNG to future LNG stations, which will enable the network to be properly managed, will also be evaluated.

The stations will be located on some of the main European goods traffic routes, at such a distance that the lorries that use LNG can circulate without supply problems.

This project is established within the European Union’s objectives for road transport, which are aimed at promoting and harmonising safer, more efficient and less polluting services. In this context, liquid natural gas is seen as a sound alternative for reducing transport-derived emissions.

GAS NATURAL FENOSA is a leader in selling compressed natural gas as an automotive fuel in Spain. The company has installed 30 supply stations, with a total supply capacity of 858 GWh/year. These stations serve most of the 3,500 vehicles that use this fuel in Spain, which are primarily buses, waste collection lorries and company fleets.

A viable short-term alternative as a fuel for transport

The use of compressed natural gas as a fuel for transport contributes to improved air quality, as it reduces oxide and nitrogen emissions and suspended particles, the main pollutants affecting human health, by more than 85%, and carbon emissions, the main cause of the greenhouse gas effect, by up to 20%. Natural gas also reduces noise pollution, because a natural gas engine produces 50% less noise than a conventional engine.

Natural gas is a very competitive fuel from an economic point of view when compared with diesel and petrol, given that it can achieve savings of up to 30% with respect to the former and 50% with respect to the latter.

A total of 26 cities now have supply stations, including Madrid, Barcelona, Burgos, Salamanca, Seville and Valencia.

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LNG World News Staff, May 23, 2013; Image: GAS NATURAL FENOSA