Fuel Distribution Networks

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Transport is a key factor in modern economies. There are an estimated 31.5 million road goods vehicles running on Europe’s motorways each year, which are coping with a steadily increasing amount of goods transported. Although these vehicles are crucial to guarantee the ubiquitous goods availability we are used to, and to assure the flexibility of European industry, they are also part of mankind’s most pressing current problems. For instance, the emission of greenhouse gases, i.e. carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NO2), hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), perfluorocarbons (PFC) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), due to fuel combustion in goods transport constitutes about 20 per cent of overall greenhouse gas emission and is only outnumbered by emissions of the energy industry. Overall decrease of these contaminants shall be, of course, one of the main objectives in the long-term, but in particular within urban agglomerations it is also of great interest to decrease local emission levels as a first sep. Changing over to less carbon-intensive fuels can reduce local carbon dioxide and other emissions, even if the well-to-wheel emission level does not improve notably. Apart from the emission problem, nearly 99% of the overall fuel consumption in transport is provided by fossil fuels and therefore competing for the finite crude oil resources with other industries, in particular the energy industry. There are many different forecasts of how long world’s oil reserves will last, but independently of these estimations it is undeniable that they will end sometime. Hence, it is the second vital transport-related challenge to make it independent from fossil energy resources by developing and introducing renewable fuels, complying technologies to run them and a reliable infrastructure to distribute them. Although there are still many problems to solve regarding technical issues, many viable solutions for running vehicles by other means than diesel and gasoline are already available. However, the biggest problem seems to be the distribution. Since vehicles and fueling infrastructure are complementarities, most customers do not use these vehicles because they can not refill them properly, and fuel companies do not introduce new fuel stations due to a lack of customers, that would use them. Consequently the main challenge currently is to break through this ‘chicken-egg’ problem and build up a fuel distribution network, which [...]