Azerbaijan, Baku, Sept. 14 /Trend S.Isayev, T. Jafarov/
Iran plans to produce adsorbed natural gas (ANG) domestically, to substitute the compressed natural gas (CNG) in the near future, Mehr reported.
Country's National Oil Refining and Distribution company and Research Institute of Petroleum industry have agreed to study the issue, and implement this strategy in the future.
Head of Oil Research Center Ali Morad Rashidi said that Iran has recently successfully achieved the point of producing ANG, as CNG's alternative.
Today's conventional approaches to natural gas storage are compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquid natural gas (LNG), but both have significant drawbacks - high costs, low storage efficiency and public safety concerns.
The favored alternative to these two storage methods is adsorbed natural gas (ANG) on a porous medium such as activated carbon.
Currently in Iran, about 18-20 million cubic meters of CNG is being used daily for nearly 3 million cars, which accounts for 25 percent of country's daily energy consumption.
Some 1,950 CNG stations currently actively operate in Iran, and the country's fifth-year development plan includes increasing this figure to 2,550 stations.
Ali Morad Rashidi said that if the number of CNG stations is increased to 2,500 stations, the daily use of CNG may reach 30 million cubic meters.
With that said, the use of ANG in vehicles makes it possible to either store a larger volume of natural gas in the same container, at the same pressure, or store he same volume of natural gas in the container at a lower pressure.