An attendant at Indian Oil's fuel retail outlet on the outskirts of Chennai slips on a pair of cryogenic gloves and an apron as a 55-tonne Volvo-made LNG-fired truck carrying a black Delhivery container snakes its way into one of the country's first LNG dispensing stations for a refill - the insulated gloves protect the attendant from cold burns, while discharging chilled, liquefied natural gas into a cryogenic tank fitted onto the side of a ₹1.2 crore truck, a pump official explains.
The station has a single dispensing unit connected by insulated pipes to a 56-kilolitre cylindrical, cryogenic LNG storage tank standing on its head. The entire process takes 20 minutes, more than what it would take to refuel a diesel vehicle.
One of the dispensing pipes is used to reduce pressure in the truck's tank and the other releases the liquefied fuel.
Vehicles in India will now roll on four kinds of fuels - petrol/diesel, pressured natural gas or CNG, biofuels like ethanol derived from grains or waste, and the latest where natural gas is chilled to a liquid at -161 degree centigrade.
LNG in transport is a $29 billion market opportunity if it completely displaces diesel, industry officials say.
It has been 17 months since Indian Oil's Sriperumbudur outlet began operations but it receives no more than 20 trucks a day, for sales of around 80 tonnes of LNG a month, an industry official says.
That is insufficient to cover the expenses for a station that takes several months to build and costs ₹5-₹8.5 crore, excluding land - several-fold pricier than a typical petrol pump.
Indian Oil saw worse when the outlet started in mid-2023. There were no customers for weeks before two or three retrofits came calling.
The action began in December, after Blue Energy Motors, an Essar affiliate, sold 40 trucks to state-run container company Concor, which then awarded a bid to Indian Oil for refueling.
Fuel economics
Esta historia es de la edición December 18, 2024 de Business Standard.
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