Navigant forecasts LD natural gas vehicles to account for 2.8% of global vehicle parc by 2024
31 December 2014
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| Cumulative light-duty NGV sales by segment. Source: Navigant. Click to enlarge. |
In a new report, Navigant Research forecasts that light-duty natural gas vehicle (LD NGV) sales will grow 119% between 2014 and 2024, culminating in 42.1 million NGVs on the world’s roads and accounting for 2.8% of all vehicles on the roads.
Overall, Navigant expects the worldwide market for LD NGVs to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.6% between 2014 and 2024, with the number of passenger car sales growing at a slightly slower rate (5.3% CAGR) than light trucks (5.6% CAGR). Asia Pacific will remain the largest market, with more than 2.0 million LD NGVs sales in 2024.
In North America, the high upfront cost, limited fueling infrastructure, reduced utility, and increased interest in electrification are likely to limit the demand for LD NGVs, the research firm posits. Navigant forecasts only 56,251 LD NGV sales in 2014 in North America. This region seems likely to remain focused on the fleet markets (such as municipal vehicles). MHD vehicles, particularly for local applications, including refuse trucks, delivery vehicles, and transit buses that operate out of centralized depots, will likely be the main market for NGVs.
The markets for LD and medium- and heavy-duty (MHD) NGVs are driven by several key factors that differ widely based on location: the availability of refueling infrastructure; tightening tailpipe emissions requirements; and total cost of ownership, which includes acquisition cost and the low cost of natural gas (NG) compared to gasoline and diesel. The mix of NGV types varies broadly based on local market conditions.
The report suggests that a number of factors could hinder near-term growth prospects in several regions:
Political tensions in Eastern Europe could affect supply and prices of gas exports from Russia to Western Europe.
Demand for new vehicle types in Western Europe continues to be sluggish as result of weak economic growth, and falling prices for crude oil globally also threaten to erode some of the price advantage of NG.
In North America, where Ford is a major vendor of LD and MD NGVs, a potentially difficult product transition for many of its trucks could limit supplies over the next couple of years.
Over the longer term, Navigant suggests, the need to continue emissions reduction and cut operating expenses will continue to spur NGV sales.
There is a lot of solutions to get cheaper transports and less pollution but to date petrol is still king and I don't see anything able to beat it, especially since crude petrol oil price when from 110$ to 53$ a barrel. I think that natural gas is a less polluting fuel but the problem is cost to build infrastructure and also cost to build cars and trucks and falling gas prices won't help. If I can buy a bi-fuel car nat gas-gasoline for let's say a thousand dollar more then I would be interested. They should convert big diesel trucks and fleet taxis first, so less stations needed and it can jump start the new business. One of the big problems is government intervention everywhere confusing the future market. They give subsidies to batteries and hydrogen ?? so where is nat gas going with that, they won't push for nat gas if they push for batteries, hydrogen, charging infrastructure, hydrogen infrastructure, batteries researchs, hydrogen researchs, petrol exploration, café mandates, compliances cars, ethanol, biofuels, carbon credits, windmills, solar panels, nuclear, etc. The government is ruling everything and don't know where he's going because there is one hundred lobbies working for the government. These lobbies are there to make money and are NOT INTERRESTED whatsoever in a simple cheap solution, instead the more problems we have the best for them. They all have 300 000$ annual salary with millions of budget to solve the problem and the only thing they don't want is to solve the problem because they will lose their paying jobs so as long as there is tons of problems then as long as they have high ranking jobs. It's the same for journalists and maybe some bloggers here. Can you imagine if someone discover big new reserves of petrol and invent an engine that burn that without pollution that do 200 mpg and gas price fall to 50 cents a gallon. If that happen most bloggers and scientists will push for higher gas taxs to subsidize batteries, windmills, hydrogen, safe nuclear, solar electricity with stockage, café mandate, co2 capture and carbon market, etc.
Posted by: gorr | 02 January 2015 at 02:13 PM