High costs, boiloff issues challenge India's LNG trucking expansion

It has been 17 months since Indian Oil's Sriperumbudur outlet began operations but it receives no more than five to 20 trucks a day, for sales of around 80 tonnes of LNG a month

An attendant at Indian Oil’s fuel retail outlet on the outskirts of Chennai slips on a pair of cryogenic gloves and an apron as a 55-tonne Volvo-made LNG-fired truck carrying a black Delhivery container snakes its way into one of the country’s first LNG dispensing stations for a refill — the insulated gloves protect the attendant from cold burns, while discharging chilled, liquefied natural gas into a cryogenic tank fitted onto the side of a Rs 1.2 crore truck, a pump official explains.

 

The station has a single dispensing unit connected by insulated pipes to a 56-kilolitre cylindrical, cryogenic LNG