Representatives of ENGIE and local authorities attended the opening of the first CNG refueling station within the administrative boundaries of Bucharest on 13 July. During the inauguration ceremony, two IVECO LCVs were refueled. The CNG available at the station is certified as product for vehicles by the Romanian Automotive Register under the name “Compressed Natural Gas for vehicles, brand GNCv ENGIE.”
“ENGIE supports, both at global and local level, the European policy to reduce the carbon emissions and promotion of ecological transportation by using alternative fuels able to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases,” said Eric Stab, Chairman & CEO at ENGIE Romania. “Our tradition as a major natural gas player gives us strong leverage to develop this alternative technology for a wide range of customers, from transport operators to companies owning large light or heavy vehicles fleets.” He also underlined that “the best prove we trust in this solution is that for the beginning we converted 25 vehicles of ENGIE fleet to CNG.”
Moreover, the vice-mayor of Bucharest Aurelian Bădulescu insisted on the importance of the direct support given to the investment by the local administrations, for it goes in the direction of cutting GHG emissions. He addressed his gratitude for “this initiative that we have to call historical, since (…) it is the first CNG station, it is the first step in a direction expected for a long time.”
The state-of-the-art station is currently the biggest, most elegant refueling station dedicated to alternative fuels in Romania. It has one distributor with two refueling ends for CNG, one NGV1 type for cars and the other, NGV2, for HDVs, but is also accessible to cars with an NGV1 adapter. The facility has an internal storage capacity of 2,240 l, the equivalent of about 300 kg of CNG, just enough to fill in 20 cars, without restarting the compressor.
Due to the constraints of building it in an intensive traffic area, the design engineers used an ingenious solution, all the technical components provided by Fornovogas being assembled on the vertical. Gheorghe Bueșteanu, general manager of Instaservice SRL, stated that “construction progressed quite rapidly, with (…) massive foundations to support the whole construction, topping the canopy with the compressor, fitting the cables and pipelines and finalizing with the endurance tests which, in the absence of vibrations, showed that it was designed properly and executed correctly.”
