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LPG and methane: what future for the car?

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ROME – Not just petrol and diesel. The transition to fully electric mobility, which envisages banning combustion engines in Europe in 2035, also calls into question the entire sector of the so-called “alternative fuels”, that is gases (LPG and methane) which for a long time have played their role in many sectors of traditional motorization.

The beauty of gas, of any kind, is that it easily adapts to normal combustion engines, both petrol and diesel, at a lower cost and with generally lower polluting emissions. We are talking about common cars but also about other uses such as buses or vehicles (the classic “forklifts”) used in large indoor plants; with the consequence of the development of a supply chain specialized in the production of dedicated components, such as pressure tanks and feeding systems. For this sector, the prospect of the “cancellation” of combustion engines in cars is equivalent to the loss of the main market and one of the first consequences is the renunciation of all manufacturers who proposed this type of fuel to further invest in methane or LPG systems. .

Will it therefore be a definitive sentence? Sector technicians prefer to talk about the need for a progressive “adjustment” of the entire supply chain, in order to reach the eventual deadline of 2035 without dramatic consequences. The perspective is that of a transition capable of adapting the industrial and production system to the evolution of the market from here to “all electric” or “zero emissions”.

It is necessary to evaluate the speed with which the demand for “gas cars” will drop and any compensations due to the new demand for methane systems for all those uses for which it is essential to give up petrol or diesel but do not can still switch to batteries. There is talk of the transport sectors and large machines that could reduce the consumption of fossil fuels by benefiting from the availability of “biomethane” (the one not extracted from the subsoil but produced from various types of waste) and all this would still ensure a long life for gas technologies .

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It must also be considered that the technologies developed for gas are conceptually applicable also to the use of hydrogen for which enormous prospects are instead opening up. However, hydrogen is destined to have an ever increasing importance, both for industrial uses and for mobility through the use of fuel cells for the direct production of electricity, and as a fuel in traditional engines.

This last option (even if inefficient from an energy point of view) is however the only feasible option to give the possibility of keeping today’s cars alive in a future in which the zeroing of CO2 emissions is required. In fact, by equipping any combustion engine with a gaseous hydrogen fuel system, from the exhaust they would only have reduced emissions of nitrogen oxides but not CO2.

In practice, the technologies for using hydrogen, both in the case of fuel cells and for combustion engines, are technically more sophisticated but substantially attributable to a system of cylinders, pressure reducers, control and injection circuits, as we know it today. . And so skills and the supply chain would not be lost.

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