TEHRAN – Having 2,500 compressed natural gas (CNG) fuel stations, Iran is the world’s third country in terms of the number of such stations, according to the head of the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC).

“With 2,500 CNG fuel stations in the country, 22 million cubic meters of CNG is distributed across the country which saves equivalent to 22 million liters of gasoline on a daily basis,” Ali-Akbar Nejda-Ali said.

According to Nejad-Ali, 400 new CNG stations are also going to go operational in various cities and the number is expected to increase to 2,900.

Mentioning a program for turning public transport vehicles into dual-fuel ones, the official said: “We planned to turn one million taxis into dual-fuel ones in the last two years of which about 300,000 taxis have become dual-fuel so far.”

The development of the CNG industry in Iran began many years ago concurrently with the development of the national gas network and currently, there is more than 40 million cubic meters of daily CNG distribution capacity in Iran.

A large part of this capacity however is not being used, and this has led the government to try to benefit from this capacity by increasing the number of dual-fuel vehicles.

Considering the advantages of CNG consumption, back in December 2019, NIORDC and Iran’s state-owned Iran Khodro Company (IKCO) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to add new dual-fuel vehicles to the country’s public transportation fleet.

Increasing the number of the country’s dual-fuel cars would mean a reduction in gasoline consumption; this gasoline could be exported and the earned revenues could be used for further developing such CNG-promoting programs.

According to NIORDC, each cubic meter of CNG consumption would save the consumer 30 cents in comparison to one liter of gasoline.

Iran’s CNG consumption currently stands at about 25 million cubic meters.

EF/MA