Rapeseed oil in the tank (FAME)

At Brunnsholms Säteri, an integrated approach has been applied for production of biodiesel. The rapeseeds are pressed for oil production, the remains from the press are used as food for the animals and remaining biomass, the “straw”, is used for heating. A small scale but advanced process equipment was used for the fuel production. Even the remaining glycerol will find its use in a biogas production plant, nearby. The tractor, of course, uses the biodiesel on the fields and for the transport of the bio fuel to the bus depot in Enköping.

It may sound like an idyllic tale, but it is in fact a first step for local fuel production for the buses in Enköping.

There is an increased interest for full sustainability. It is not easy to achieve. But, in small and medium scale much can be achieved.

Today the whole concept was presented to the press and TV. Ylva Cohn (Upplands Lokaltrafik), Peder Rinman (Brunnsholms Säteri), Tom Mattsson (Swebus), Anna Wiklund (Enköping Kommun) and Volvo Bus Corporation are partners in this test.

 

The busses have now been running a couple of month with the local rapeseed fuel. The Volvo workshop follows the trials closely, so far all good!

I did some rough calculations and found that when running on biodiesel the fossil CO2 emission will be about 5 g per passenger kilometres when the bus is full seated with 58 passengers.

I would expect it to give one of the lowest values for environemental load ever achieved for person transports, including rail bound transports on “green electricity”.

After the event we were treated with a lunch at the mid 17th century estate of Brunnsholm.

US in focus

I feel that most of my reports have been about European issues from an European perspective. Today I want to spend some lines on the US development.

US essentially face the same challenge as Europe.The transport sector has increased the emissions of green house gases more than other sectors and is therefore in focus. For large and dens cities in particular, person transports by bus constitute an alternative to cars.

Even if buses already offer the most energy efficient and environmental friendly alternative, further effort is spent on improvement. There are three technology areas that can be realised in the immediate future to improve the efficiency further:

-Energy hybrid buses with break energy recuperation, where the US by no doubt is the leading market. Nova Bus, a Volvo Bus company, offers today a hybrid bus with good fuel saving figures.

-Bus infrastructure for capacity buses, with separate lanes, priority at traffic lights, advanced information system for passenger information and traffic control.

-Sustainable fuels that are compatible with existing fuel infrastructure and engine technologies

 Nova Hybrid bus, Nova LFS HEV

US is the worlds largest consumer of biofuels. As for all new fuels an intensive work is conducted to analyse and approve new standards.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/bd4379a92ceceeac8525735900400c27/733c5e038c982a97852573e900531d7a!OpenDocument

BBC recently reported that US hopes that the worlds major economies will conclude a leaders declaration in the G8 summit in July.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7263225.stm

From the environment and for buses this is an unreserved positive development that is expected to increase the pace of change even further.

The importance of separate bus lanes

My trip to work yesterday took 1 hour and 20 minutes. An accident caused a traffic chaos. Irritated, I looked at the bus that tried to squeeze its way in to my lane.

Buses should have their own lanes, for many reasons.

I did some back of an envelope calculation for my cost for travelling to work (40 km one direction) and I did some rough estimates of the resulting CO2 emission.

It is most expensive to go by car and it also gives the highest CO2 emissions. The bus costs, as calculated as cost without taxes and subsidiaries, less than 20 kr.

Now, a lot of political attention is bought to the use of alternative fuels from agriculture, such as ethanol and biodiesel (biogas should not be categorised here, being a combination of waste management and fuel source). The alternative fuels are subsidised and does not bring taxes to the society. The cost is therefore somewhat higher, and the CO2 advantage is modest.

While the infrastructure investments for modern bus systems, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) are modest, the operational cost decrease a lot.

For trains and metro almost no one is questioning the need for specific infrastructure.

If buses were given the same treat as other means of public transports it would give a major improvement of both the cost and the environment.

Bus charter to the Alps

I spent last week with my family skiing in the Alps. We had a wonderful week with seven days with plenty of snow and a lot of sun. We took a bus charter from Gothenburg (Sweden) to Rauris in Austria. In total we were 52 on the bus out of which we already knew about half the guests. Lennart and Lars, Volvo colleagues, brought their GPS and logged the movement of the bus. We averaged 95 km/h when the ferry and tank stop was excluded. The fuel consumption gave a total of 40 kg carbon dioxide per passenger for the total trip from Sweden to Austria.

 Photo: Julia Jobson

 

By this time of the year Swedish magazines and news papers publish travel guides that present numerous of alternatives where to find the best skiing.

 

This year, there has been some focus on environmentally friendly ways to travel. I have been trying to find recent articles in English language, without success. Please send me a comment if you know where to find an English site with recent data on carbon dioxide emissions for different holiday charters.

 

In Swedish language (in the diagrams at the bottom) train is “Tåg”) :

 

http://www.aftonbladet.se/resa/article1826736.ab

 

It is clear that the bus beats the train clearly in Europe, depending on the country and amount of coal and other fossil power in the electric grid the details vary. In average the bus has about 50% less emissions of green house gases, than the corresponding train. Cars and Air travel have much higher emissions.

 

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I want to emphasize that from a green house perspective the worst development that can take place is that we use more fossil coal, oil or gas for either production of fuel or electricity, and improved energy efficiency is always positive.

CNG for all new buses in Delhi

Close to midnight Indian time, I finally got to write some lines from the last two days.

Early in the morning the 5th most of the speakers from the seminar in Bangalore travelled together to Delhi. The trip went smooth and we had time for an excursion in the Delhi traffic. We got a Volvo B7R bus for the tour! It stood out among the local buses. The local market is mainly dominated by Tata.

The are similarities between Bangalore and Delhi traffic situation. In both cases, in general, the traffic is really dense and the congestion problems need urgent actions, most of the vehicles idle the engine most of the time. For the current situation the hybrid will be very usefull. But in Bangalore I experienced a larger variation in vehicle mix (bikes, motorbikes, three-wheelers, cars, different kinds of trucks and buses).

In Dehli, by first sight there were more of the larger vehicles and most three wheelers run on natural gas. CNG is also required for all new buses. This is not the case for Bangalore. Therefore I reworked a part of my presentation to better capture the Delhi situation.

Two environmental ministers

In the morning yesterday (the 6th of February) I took the opportunity to run in the adjacent park. I got closely acquainted with the traffic, almost too closely; the left hand driving requires some extra attention. The morning air was fresh and cool with a freezing temperature of about 5 C, as compared to Bangalores 19 C. I should have brought long training trousers.

After the initial press conference we got the honour to have the excellencies, the Minsters of Environment of India, Namo Narain Meena and Sweden, Andreas Carlgren, visiting the exhibition and seminars.

The exhibition contained the new Volvo heavy duty hybrid, clean plants, sustainable fuels, Bus Rapid Transit and Volvo Cars progress. The ministers were guided by Inge Horkeby (AB Volvo) and Niclas Gustavsson (Volvo Cars).

At the seminar both ministers gave long and detailed speech on the future plans to meet both hazardous emissions and green house gases. A broad plan for, infrastructure, fuels and vehicles will be needed. India is facing a rapidly increasing urbanisation and is becoming one of the world’s largest emitters of green house gases. Several mega cities will grow further. The main challenge will be to maintain a rapid growth of economy and transports and simultaneously decrease hazardous emissions and green house gases, a tough challenge.

I focused my speach at the seminar on the recent improvement in emission technologies that is available for markets with low sulphur diesel. Once Euro IV or higher is available in India, the implementation of BRT systems will give both efficiency, low cost, and emission performance!

It seems that all agree to the technical arguments. But there is a general concern by many of the visitors, that the existing Delhi rule, saying only CNG buses, will force less cost efficient solutions.

The exhibition was decorated with some Volvo vehicles. We learned that 50% of Delhi person transports are made by bus already.

To summarise the visit in India: high level persons in India have pin pointed the critical environmental situation, not least the relationship to transports as a major issue. Last year the economical growth was over 8%.

To maintain the momentum, the transport problems need to be solved. Many look at China with envy. There the political leadership is said to have less political limitations and can thus proceed their future plans without hindrance. Construction enterprises push for large project, such as metro, that have little relevance for most people.

The political leadership now face challenges to solve the traffic: congestion, environment, safety and equity issues simultaneously. Can Volvo and buss operators play a more active role in promoting future combined solutions?

Traffic jam in India

For the first times for months I have been able to run with shorts, the last couple of days here in Bangalore in India. Yesterday, Maria Karlsson turned out to be an enthusiastic runner. We took two laps around the horse race track in total 7km.

At breakfast some of the other Swedish speakers joined in; Bo Galle (Chalmers University), Niclas Gustavsson (Volvo Cars), Inge Horkeby, Lennart Pilskog, and Lars Mårtensson (Volvo), Lars-Erik Liljelund (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency) and Lars Nilsson (Swedish Road Administration). We had an inspiring talk on the future on environmental priorities in Sweden.

We had the opportunity to show one of our Volvo B7RLE city buses from India and we also took the opportunity to Inform about our Hosakote bus body plant that was inaugurated last week. Akash Passey, that I learned to know during his time in Sweden, is our managing director.

After the press conference we had a seminar series on sustainable mobility. For me as a newcomer to India, I learned a lot about the priorities and local conditions. In many ways the need for a firm political leadership is as essential as in Europe.

There were many highlights. If I have to choose one, Prof. Gita Sen possibly raised the, for me, most complex issue about the availability of public transports for the people. When sharing the same streets as the three wheelers and two wheelers the average speed is less than 10 km/h. With the present traffic situation the public transport for most people is too slow to be efficient and they therefore have to choose less environmentally friendly solutions such as two wheelers.

Food for thought

A recent report by UN/GBEP (supported by in total 184 NGOs from AAFC to WWF) highlights the importance of global energy efficiency from many aspects:

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a1348e/a1348e00.pdf

One would assume that the recently proposed EU directive for sustainable energy would be harmonised with the global demands. It is not fully the case.

The transport sector is the only sector that has specific targets, 10% bio fuel by 2020. By fixing the relative minimum target to 10% two of the globally highest priorities are counteracted.

-An approach that allows targeting the sector with the highest potential of improvement (not specific targets by sector)

-An approach that value performing the same useful work but with less energy (independently of its origin)

Buses provide the most energy efficient transports of people, as calculated by travelled kilometre per person. There is a need for global consensus about the priorities and the preferred rout to harmonise the actions globally.