TEHRAN – Deputy Director of National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company (NIOPDC) says the government has started a program to turn public vehicles into dual-fuel cars, IRNA reported on Sunday.

According to Hamid Qasemi Deh-Cheshmeh, the program was started with converting 600 public pickup trucks.

“We expect that about 1000 public vehicles including pickup trucks and taxis to be converted every day [during the program],” Qasemi said.

The official mentioned a website that has been created for registering the vehicles in the program and noted that so far 45,000 vehicles have been registered of which 25,000 were ruled out of the program since they weren’t public vehicles.

Back in February, Qasemi had announced that the government plans to implement a program for converting the country’s public transportation fleet into dual-fuel cars.

According to the official, the said program was aimed at converting over 1.46 million public vehicles into dual-fuel ones within 15 months.

The program includes converting a variety of public vehicles like vans, pickup trucks, and buses.

In early December 2019, the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with state-owned automaker Iran Khodro Company (IKCO) to add new dual-fuel vehicles to the country’s public transportation fleet.

Based on the mentioned MOU, the two sides agreed to cooperate in converting or manufacturing 1.46 million dual-fuel vehicles to be added to the public transportation fleet.

The program is expected to reduce the country’s daily gasoline consumption by 10 million liters and save the government 200 trillion rials (about $4.7 billion).

Iran started a program, last year, for the rationing of subsidized gasoline and increased fuel prices to reduce the energy subsidies and to use the revenue for supporting underprivileged families.

According to the spokesman of Iranian Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters Union (OPEX), the gasoline rationing scheme has made it possible for the country to export 25-30 million liters of gasoline every day.

Iran produces 115 million liters of gasoline per day, of which 60 to 65 million liters are provided as subsidized fuel and another 20 million liters are sold in the free market, the rest which is about 30 million liters is exported.

Qasemi, who is the director for NIOPDC’s CNG project, also announced in February that in 15 months, NIOPDC will put 40 new compressed natural gas (CNG) filling stations into operation throughout the country.

EF/MA