Blue Corridor 2014 rally arrives in Belgrade

BELGRADE - The Blue Corridor 2014 natural gas vehicle rally arrived in Belgrade on Monday for the first time ever.

The goal of the rally, which hit the road in Saint Petersburg in mid-October, is to draw attention to the large traffic flow between Western and Eastern Europe, which can become environmentally acceptable with compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Gas as a fuel is a good solution for an environmentally cleaner, cheaper transport in Europe, and therefore there needs to be a denser network of gas filling stations, Eugene Pronin, a Gazprom Export senior expert for liquefied gas exports, said at a round table held at the NIS Business Centre in Belgrade.

As one of the hubs of the European market, Serbia has great potential for developing methane use - CNG and LNG, he said.

NIS is preparing a long-term strategy for developing CNG use in Serbia, and plans to open a CNG filling station in Novi Sad next year, as well as another two afterwards, NIS representative Jeno Baronek announced.

Although the natural gas vehicles market in Serbia is still in an early stage of development, there are already 840 natural gas-fuelled vehicles in the country, as well as nine filling stations, the conference was told.

Sergey Kolin, a director at the NGV Italy consortium, said that around 1 million cars in Italy use CNG and that there are 1,200 CNG filling stations in the country.

Noting the development of gas use by transportation vehicles in Germany, E.ON's Cliff Mueller-Trimbusch said that a CNG filling station is available every five kilometres in urban areas of the country and every 20-25 kilometres in its rural regions.

The Blue Corridor natural gas vehicle...