On a recent morning in Yutian, a dusty town bisected by the highway that connects Beijing to the sea, Su Meiquan strolled into a dealership packed with hulking trucks and prepared to drive off with a brand new rig.
YUTIAN, China (Reuters) – On a recent morning in Yutian, a dusty town bisected by the highway that connects Beijing to the sea, Su Meiquan strolled into a dealership packed with hulking trucks and prepared to drive off with a brand new rig.
After years of driving a diesel truck for a trucking company, he had decided to buy his own vehicle – a bright red rig fueled with liquefied natural gas, capable of hauling as much as 40 tonnes of loads like steel or slabs of marble.
Su hopes the LNG truck – less polluting and cheaper to operate than diesel ones – will be the cornerstone of his own business, plying the route to the western fringes of China.
“Everybody says gas is cleaner with nearly no emissions,” he said after signing a stack of paperwork in the dealer’s office. In front of him, photos of proud drivers posing in front of their own new LNG trucks had been taped to the wall.
Sales of large LNG trucks are expected to hit record levels in China this year as the government steps up an anti-pollution campaign that includes curbs on heavy-duty diesel vehicles.
LNG trucks account for about four percent of the more than six million heavy vehicles able to haul 40 to 49 tonnes of goods that are currently on China’s roads. The vast majority of the 43 billion tonnes of freight transported across China last year was by highway.
But demand for LNG trucks is soaring as companies and manufacturers shift to vehicles that run on the gas that Beijing sees as a key part of its war against smog.
Sales of LNG heavy trucks surged 540 percent to nearly 39,000 in the first seven months of the year, according to Cassie Liu, a truck analyst with the IHS Markit consultancy.
That was partly fueled by a ban this year on the use of diesel trucks to transport coal at northern ports in provinces like Hebei and Shandong, and in the city of Tianjin.
“We are seeing a blowout in LNG trucks this year, thanks to the government’s policy push,” said Mu Lei, marketing manager for China National Heavy Duty Truck Group [CNHTC. UL], known as Sinotruk, the country’s largest manufacturer of heavy-duty trucks.
The shift to gas trucks is helping fuel demand for LNG in China, as are other government measures aimed at clearing the air, especially in the north, which is shrouded in a hazardous coal-fueled smog for much of the winter.
