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The developer of a home refuelling station for compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles is looking for a British manufacturer to produce the devices for export.
Norman Lecce, managing director of Gasfill, has a pre-production prototype ready for manufacture and is seeking a partner to manufacture “tens of thousands of the devices per annum”.
“It’s an environmental product, high-end engineering, with great export opportunities,” he said. “It has a modular design consisting of a driver mechanism, gas pathways, an enclosure and a controller. At its core is a compressor that pumps the gas at pressures of up to 250 bar.
“The compressor is our own unique design, and we have patents for it. The compressor has a three-stage concentric cylinder arrangement which is completed and is completely oil-free. It’s designed to reduce the number of parts and minimise costs,” he said.
“We need a firm, capable of high-precision machining and mass-producing to drive the price down, which preferably knows natural gas. We do recognise these requirements are a big ask, but it would be great if a UK company could take it forward.”
Lecce added that the compressor design could be used for other applications and with other gases.
Although there are only a few hundred CNG vehicles in the UK, the technology is popular in Asia and is gaining momentum in the US and elsewhere in Europe.
The market is well-developed in Italy, which has around 750,000 vehicles, and in Germany, where there are around 80,000 vehicles and 900 fast-fuel stations. There is also massive growth in Asia and the US.
Several major car makers, such as Volkswagen, have recently announced CNG variants of popular models.
Honda has offered a CNG Civic since 1998. Most notably, Volkswagen recently announced plans to offer CNG variants of models such as the Golf, Passat and the Up!, badged as TGI.
However, in most places the refuelling infrastructure for the vehicles remains underdeveloped.Only one home refuelling station is available in Europe, produced by Italian firm BRC Fuelmaker, while several companies in the US, including GE and Eaton Corp, have products in development.
“I’ve always felt that home refuelling stations were a fantastic idea,” said Lecce. “They enable consumers to buy a CNG car without the need for the infrastructure to be established. They enable the market to be established more readily.”
Lecce has been developing the home refuelling appliance since 2004. The first proof-of-concept device was produced two-and-a-half years ago, but it was too large, he said. Gasfill has been funded in the past by a Technology Strategy Board grant.
“To achieve mass market penetration, you have to have low-through life costs,” he said. “Our target has always been 4,000 hours without any maintenance.”
The Gasfill equipment is designed to meet draft EU standards and has layers of automated checks and shutdown procedures, said Lecce. It has been designed “to keep the user away from the inside” at all times.
Natural gas vehicles emit less carbon dioxide and are cheaper to run than petrol or diesel vehicles. Some estimates for CNG claim that emissions can be reduced by up to a quarter in bi-fuel vehicles. Natural gas is also on course for becoming the cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel this decade.
In addition, development costs are lower when compared with hydrogen or battery hybrids.