India’s largest distributor of natural gas is to join with an Australian firm in the world’s first commercial-sized trial of a hydrogen-enriched blend of Natural Gas designed to reduce notorious pollution levels from that country’s massive public transport bus fleets.
The trial will see between 50-70 buses on the streets of Mumbai, a city of some 16 million people, by the end of this year.
The buses will be fuelled by Hythane, a blend of Natural Gas enriched with 15-20% hydrogen and developed by the US subsidiary of Perth-based and ASX-listed clean fuel technologist, Eden Energy Limited (ASX: EDE).
Hythane has been shown to reduce harmful emissions and greenhouse gases from gas-powered vehicles by up to 50% whilst increasing their efficiency by up to 15%.
The Mumbai breakthrough for the demonstration project in the capital of Maharashtra state is encapsulated in a cooperation agreement signed between Eden and India’s largest natural gas distributor, the state-owned GAIL (India) Limited, and its Mumbai-based subsidiary, Mahanagar Gas Limited (MGL).
MGL is also partly-owned by British Gas – a major player in Australia’s CSM market.
The new agreement will see Eden over the next nine to twelve months install a Hythane refuelling station and associated infrastructure at a bus depot in central Mumbai operated by the state-owned BEST Undertaking.
Hythane will initially fuel two buses and expand to more than 50 natural gas powered buses. BEST currently operates more than 4,000 buses in Mumbai from 25 bus stations. More than half of this bus fleet currently uses Natural Gas, with BEST progressively converting its entire fleet to Natural Gas operation by 2013.
MGL supplies all the natural gas to BEST.
The trial buses will use the Hythane fuel for a six-month period, targeted to commence in the last quarter of 2010. If the participants are satisfied with the outcome, they will then assess rolling out Hythane-fuelled buses across Mumbai’s public bus fleets and the remainder of MGL’s market footprint, which supplies an estimated 25 million people.
Eden’s executive chairman Greg Solomon said the demonstration project, the first of the company&r... Next Page
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