Gazprom's Blue Corridor Rally Has Iberian Launch
The 11th Blue Corridor rally, for factory-built vehicles powered by natural gas and LNG kicked off in Lisbon on September 18.
Participants cover 5,700 km in 18 days, crossing nine European countries, to finish in Saint Petersburg, timed to coincide with the St. Petersburg International Gas Forum on October 5. It will pass through Madrid, Milan, Ulm, Berlin and Tallinn.
The focus of this year's rally is the use of LNG as a motor fuel for trucks, said Gazprom which has organised the event since its start in 2008.
The rally’s first three stages are within the Iberian Peninsula: stage 1 (680 km) from Lisbon to Madrid ended at the Endesa refuelling station in Valdemoro; stage 2 (640 km) from Madrid to Barcelona ending at the Gas Natural station in Petronieves; and stage 3 between Barcelona and Marseille.
The Iberian part of the rally is being carried out in collaboration with the Iberian Association for Natural Gas as a Fuel (Gasnam) as well as other Spanish and Portuguese companies active in promoting LNG and gas as a vehicle fuel, including roughly a dozen suppliers such as Spanish gas grid Enagas (as coordinator for the CORE LNGas hive project), Galp, Gas Natural, alongside vehicle makers Iveco and Seat.
CORE LNGas hive, which is co-financed by the European Commission and includes Enagas and Spanish ports operator Puertos del Estado, has designed a mobile exhibition that travels by an LNG-powered tractor unit Iveco Stralis 400 on loan to Enagas by Iveco for this event.
Enagas said September 19 that the LNG semitrailer aims to promote LNG as one of the most environmentally friendly fuels; this mobile exhibition has been travelling since April 2017 around 45 Iberian cities and has been visited by more than 5,000 people and has a total of 42 CORE LNGas partners.
Map credit: Gazprom
Gazprom says that over the past decade of Blue Corridor rallies, over 170 factory-built CNG and LNG vehicles drove over 40,000 km across 22 European countries visiting 110 cities from Yekaterinburg to Brussels and from Gothenburg to Sochi.
Mark Smedley