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19.9.11

LNG versus GTL * USA - The future truck and bus fuel battle

(Photo, Westport Innovations: Inside Westport's engine assembly plant)
New York,NY,USA -Automotive World (UK), by Alan Bunting -September 19, 2011: -- It was recently announced that Shell had entered into an agreement with Vancouver-based Westport Innovations to promote the wider use of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as an alternative fuel in North America, mainly for commercial vehicles, by helping to consolidate fuel supply and customer support by way of specialised after-sales services...  Natural gas as a vehicle fuel, mainly in compressed form (CNG), is already in widespread use, especially in parts of the world adjacent to gas fields. In such situations, the cost of getting the gas, often by pipeline, to the point of use - typically the depot of a large truck or bus fleet - is relatively modest. There are powerful lobby groups such as the Natural Gas Vehicle Association, with astute publicity machines behind them, which have succeeded in boosting the profile of CNG as an automotive fuel. However, its penetration into a market dominated by diesel power remains limited...  Moving from diesel to CNG or LNG fuelling usually brings ongoing fuel cost savings. Those savings come not from combustion efficiency improvements - where the diesel continues to reign supreme - but chiefly from more favourable fuel duty levels imposed by national governments keen to encourage NG use, for emission and/or oil import reduction reasons...  The main shortcoming of GTL is one of production scale. For it to be competitive in price, production plants requiring investment comparable with that of large oil refineries are needed...   But if, as predicted, future global oil price rises outstrip those for NG, then GTL will become a more viable proposition and, crucially, a more practical one when compared with LNG. In a decade or so, competition between LNG and GTL is likely to become a key issue for the truck and bus fuelling business...

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