Q. What is HCNG?
A. The blending of hydrogen with CNG provides a blended gas termed as HCNG. HCNG stands for hydrogen-enriched compressed natural gas and it combines the advantages of both hydrogen and methane.
HCNG allows customers early hydrogen deployment with nearly commercial technology.
It is being treated as the first step towards future hydrogen economy.
Hydrogen has been regarded as a future secondary fuel for power system due to carbon-free operation.
Q. Why is this in news?
A. Delhi will be the first city in the country to roll out hydrogen-enriched compressed natural gas (HCNG) buses for public transport from November 2020. It will start as a pilot project with 50 CNG buses retrofitted with HCNG.
Q. What are its advantages?
• HCNG reduces emissions of CO up to 70%.
• Enables up to 5 % savings in fuel.
• First step towards future Hydrogen economy.
• Engines can be calibrated to release lower amounts of NO.
• Engines need minimum modification to run on HCNG.
• Ideal fuel for high load applications and heavy-duty vehicles.
• Better performance due to higher Octane rating of H2.
Q. What are its disadvantages?
• Determining the most optimized H2/ NG (Natural Gas) ratio.
• It requires new infrastructures for preparing HCNG.
• Many steps need to be taken for commercializing it at a large scale.