Natural gas, driving Europe’s mobility forward

The Natural Gas Vehicles Association joins GasNaturally, highlighting the industry’s innovation potential.

Natural gas is key to our daily lives: it heats our homes, produces our electricity and powers our industries. It can also be key to fuel our mobility, and make it cleaner.

That’s why NGVA Europe has decided to join GasNaturally and is looking forward to working with the other members to further raise the profile of natural gas – and gas vehicles – in Europe together.

Many important developments are currently under way at the political level as well as within the gas industry. They will determine the role that natural gas will play in the fuel mix of the future, and the fuel that will power our transport.

Natural gas is the most obvious candidate for quick wins today. And together with electricity and hydrogen, it also provides opportunities for integrating more renewables in the transport sector in the future.

As a fuel, natural gas is already widely available throughout Europe; the products and technologies to use it in vehicles are mature and available on the market; gas infrastructure is well-developed and reliable; renewable Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG), also known as power-to-gas, and further use of blends of natural gas with biomethane are an important focus for energy and automotive companies. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) can become the preferred solution to reduce emissions from heavy-duty vehicles and ships, while Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is already being used in cars, vans, buses. Many different models are on the market today from established manufacturers. They can help to reach the target of a 30% CO2 reduction by 2030 in the non-ETS (Emission Trading Scheme) sectors, which include transport.

To put it simply: natural gas should be at the forefront of cleaner mobility towards 2050. It can reduce noise pollution as well as NOx and PM emissions.

In fact, policy makers are increasingly more interested in natural gas as fuel. Market rules and technology neutrality should be the starting point of the political discussion. To achieve the ultimate goal of decarbonising our transport in a cost-efficient way, we should take into account costs – of the fuel, the vehicles and the components – and the different levels of a variety of emissions.

We are still far from that.

CNG and LNG offer great opportunities for cities in the EU that are increasingly facing air quality issues. For them to take full advantage of such opportunities, we need to bring the market for gas vehicles up to scale. This can happen only if no single winner is picked from the start. All alternative fuels will play a role in the future, different technologies will serve different purposes and natural gas engines need to be able to compete on an equal footing.

NGVA Europe´s members stand for a proud and ambitious industry, eager to invest, grow and play an important role in providing sustainable mobility for our society.

As a new GasNaturally member, we look forward to actively contributing to this initiative which highlights gas’ role towards “Make a clean future real.”

Matthias Maedge, Secretary General

“The huge potential and benefits of natural gas engines are not sufficiently rewarded”