No. 3, 2009

The status of and prospects for gas-engine fuel in Russia

For many, many years, technologies have been sought for producing a cheap and environmentally clean fuel for road transport. Practice has shown that mass use of biofuel and hydrogen will not be economically feasible in the near future. At the same time, the most efficient modern alternative fuel is gas. Russia already has excellent launch opportunities for gasification of transport in the country.

History repeats itself

The first successful attempts to use gas as a fuel for engines were made at the end of the 19th century. In 1872, the Austrian Paul Henlein constructed an airship equipped with an engine running on compressed lighting gas obtained by means of distillation from mineral coal. In 1876, Nikolaus Otto built a 4-stroke gas engine that was later manufactured at the Otto Deutz plant and used extensively in industry. Such engines are known to have been used at electric power plants in a number of cities of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet Russian historians date use of gas as an engine fuel in the country from 1936, when the Resolution of the Soviet of People's Commissars of the USSR on gasification of road transport was issued. According to the Resolution, in 1937, about 500 vehicles running on gas were to reach the country's road network. For a number of reasons, however, this plan was not fated to be fulfilled and, in 1938, gasification of transport was still at the stage of individual experiments. Yet, in 1939, the Motor Vehicle Research Institute (NAMI) created the gas-producer vehicles ZIS-21 and GAZ-42 using wood fuel, and the compressed gas vehicles ZIS-30 and GAZ-44, running on liquefied petroleum gas. Soon afterwards, that same year, the first NGV-refuelling compressor stations were constructed in Moscow, Melitopol and Gorlovka.

In the 1950s, the compressed gas vehicles GAZ-51B and ZIS-156, running on compressed natural gas, were designed and brought into production. In all, during the decade, 30 big stations were built supplying gas to about 40,000 vehicles.

By 1957, GAZ-51Zh and ZIS-156A trucks running on liquefied petroleum gas were being produced and, in 1973-1975, five different versions of trucks with gas engines were coming off the production lines.

Methane "see-saws"

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was already sharing first place with Italy in the sphere of transport gasification. The difficult economic situation in the USSR meant that the country's leaders had to take a series of decisive steps to put right the critical situation on the fuel market. One such measure was adoption of a national program for gasification of transport. As a result of its implementation, by 1991, hundreds of gas filling stations had been built in the USSR. About 350,000 vehicles were running on methane, and natural gas sales for transport had reached 1.1 billion m³ by that time.

Gazprom undertook development and implementation of the program. Its initial success was promoted significantly by adoption in 1993 of a government resolution setting the price of gas for transport at no more than 50% of the cost of А-76 gasoline. It should be said that this progressive resolution is still in effect today.

This program was not, however, fated to be implemented in full. The serious political and economic disruptions experienced by the country at the end of the 20th century led to a 10-fold reduction in the engine gas market. For instance, sales of compressed natural gas for transport dropped in the Russian Federation from 511.6 million m³ in 1990 to 58 million m³ in 1998.

The 1998 crisis in Russia promoted development of the gas business and mass construction of gas filling complexes. By 2008, the number of such gas filling

stations had increased more than 10-fold and exceeded 3,000, while vehicles running on gas had increased in numbers only 7-8-fold, to reach 1,300,000, which is about 3% of the 40,000,000 vehicles on the Russian roads. In Russia today, gas filling stations sell some 2.5 million tons of engine fuel gas a year.

The green light to transport gasification

Russia has 32% of global gas reserves. A unified gas supply network provides gas to over 20,000 of the country's population centers, including 700 towns with a high concentration of road transport. The substantial volumes of associated petroleum gas obtained during oil production also constitute a mighty resource base for developing gas-powered transport in the country.

Currently, Russian oil and gas companies are gradually entering the promising engine fuel gas market. For instance, though Gazprom is the leader in the compressed methane vehicle filling segment, LUKOIL is gradually occupying one of the leading positions on the liquefied gas retail market. In 2008, the oil major sold, in Russia alone, over 49,000 tons of propane-butane mixture at its gas filling stations. LUKOIL's four gas-processing plants and solid program for utilization of petroleum gas give the Company grounds for anticipating a further successful development of its gas filling station network in Russia.

Together with the Russian Gas Society, Gazprom has proposed to the Russian Government that integrated target programs be developed and adopted for "Alternative fuel for transport and agricultural equipment in 2010-2020" and "Blue Sky Fuel for the White Olympics" (transfer of Sochi municipal transport to gas by 2014).

At the same time, the development of the engine fuel gas market in Russia is not restricted to expansion of the network of gas filling stations. After all, natural gas can fuel not only vehicle engines. The benefits from using it have been fully appreciated on the Russian Railways, too. Today, together with JSC Russian Railways, Gazprom is successfully implementing a program for gasification of mainline and shunting locomotives. In January 2009, on the experimental track of the Railway Transport Research Institute in Shcher-binka, a gas-turbine locomotive pulled a freight train with a gross weight of 15,020 tons. This is a world haulage record for autonomous locomotives with one power plant. The results of the tests of the gas-turbine locomotive confirmed the high economic efficiency of this innovative project: fuel (liquefied natural gas) costs turned out to be 30% less than when diesel fuel is used. The harmful emission indicators registered during the tests are already merely a fifth of the European Union requirements to be introduced from 2012 and the pass-by noise is no more than that of a mainline locomotive with only a third of the power.

In conjunction with the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, the company has also developed and approved an Integrated Program for encouraging broad-scale introduction of modern technologies for transferring agricultural equipment to engine fuel gas.

The experts do not anticipate broad-scale use of biofuels and hydrogen in transport in the next few years, while gas retains more favorable positions in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile Russia, as the world's leading gas power, has excellent launch opportunities for gasification of transport.