Diesel locomotives running on green fuel
The Indian Railways is opening a tender to purchase 50 million litres of bio diesel to form part of the 20 billion litres of diesel it uses each year to fuel its 5000 diesel locomotives
. This follows successful running of diesel locomotives on 100 per cent bio diesel at is Lucknow laboratory and trains on tracks using a maximum of 25 per cent bio-diesel mixed with conventional diesel. Bio-diesel in India comes from the Jatropha plant, which can be grown on waste land and alongside railway tracks.
In Mumbai, all of the city’s 55,000 taxis have been converted to run on compressed natural gas as have 90 per cent of the 100,000 auto rickshaws and nearly 20 per cent of the buses. This has massively reduced pollution as well as saving operators a shed load of money.
For more ways of saving money and the planet, see the Energy Efficiency Technical Report in the October edition of “Eureka”.
