Natural gas vehicles

Available vehicles

Passenger Cars
Light Transport Vehicles 

Natural gas can be used in all classes of vehicles - motorcycles, cars, vans, trucks, buses, lift trucks, locomotives, even ships and ferries. NGVs are available from many manufacturers including e.g. Opel, Fiat, Mercedes, Ford, Volkswagen, Citroen and Iveco.  

The Benefits of natural gas vehicles are:

  • Available now
  • Reduced particulate and NOx (Nitrogen Oxides) emissions
  • Reduced greenhouse gas emissions
  • Widespread availability of natural gas
  • Lower cost
  • Can be derived from renewable sources (biomethane)
  • Technically proven
  • Can be used in all vehicle classes
  • Safer than most liquid fuels
  • Noise reductions of as much as 50%

With these benefits, its easy to see why natural gas vehicle (NGV) numbers have more than doubled in the last 5 years. There are almost 5 million NGVs worldwide and the International Association for Natural Gas Vehicles (IANGV) is projecting that this will increase at least ten-fold, to 50 million vehicles by 2020.

According to the International Association of Natural Gas Vehicles there are approx. 4 million NGVs in use worldwide, of which 1.6 million are in Argentina and 1.5 million in Pakistan. 
Italy’s fleet of 430,000 NGV is by far the biggest in Europe, followed by Germany with 55,000 and Bulgaria with 25,000.   

 Rank  

 Country

 Natural Gas Vehicles 

 Refuelling Stations 

  1

 Argentina

 1.650.000

 1.400

  2

 Pakistan

 1.550.000

 1.606

  3

 Brazil

 1.425.513

 1.442

  4

 Italy

 432.900

 558

  5

 India

 334.820

 321

  6

 Iran

 263.662

 179

  7

 Colombia

 203.292

 310

  8

 USA

 146.876

 1.340

  9

 China

 127.120

 355

 10

 Ukraine

 100.000

 147

 11

 Armenia

 81.394

 128

 12

 Bangladesh

 80.000

 118

 13

 Russia

 75.000

 213

 14

 Egypt

 69.376

 99

 15

 Bolivia

 64.828

 87

 16

 Germany

 55.272

 700

 17

 Venezuela

 44.146

 149

 18

 Thailand

 33.982

 44

 19

 Japan

 31.462

 311

 20

 Bulgaria

 25.225

 9

(IANGV, June 2007)

Natural gas vehicles have a spark-ignition internal combustion engines (apart from dual-fuel models – see below) and are broadly similar to petrol vehicles but with different fuel storage and delivery mechanisms. 

Since natural gas does not liquefy under compression, it must either be stored onboard vehicles as very high pressure compressed natural gas (CNG), usually at 200bar.

CNG fuel tanks have to be strong to withstand in excess of 200bar pressure, so they are usually made out of thick, heavy steel.  NGV fuel tanks are therefore either large or heavy, which means natural gas is best suited for larger vehicles such as trucks, buses or vans.  Nevertheless, favourable taxation policies have led to CNG cars being reasonably popular in some countries. 

Natural Gas Systems and Technologies

There are two fuel options for natural gas vehicles: Dedicated NGVs run only on natural gas, bi-fuel NGVs can switch between natural gas and petrol. There are advantages and disadvantages in all two options:

Dedicated (mono-fuel) NGVs can be optimised to run on NG by using higher compression ratios, which generally leads to higher engine efficiencies.  This is possible because NG has a higher octane number than either petrol or diesel, which means the compression ratios can be increased without inducing knocking. 

Many light-duty NGVs (cars and vans) have bi-fuel engines to eliminate the danger of running out of fuel and unable to find a NG refuelling station.  This is more likely to be a problem with light-duty vehicles since they have more varied less predictable patters of use than trucks or buses and because cars in particular are not able to accommodate large fuel tanks.  However, bi-fuel NGVs cannot be optimised to operate on natural gas and therefore do not show full potential for reducing tailpipe emissions. 

(Source: International Association for Natural Gas Vehicles)