Alternative Fuels for Vehicles

From an automation point of view, it’s business as usual

Just as the increase in natural gas production is changing the way nations look at energy, the vehicle fueling market is expected to undergo big changes too.

Gas has become a competitive fuel and is more environmental friendly. As a result of this, dispenser and gauge manufacturers are increasing their efforts in supporting the oil companies in retailing this alternative. One example of this is Russia, where according to The Moscow Times:

President Putin has mandated the building of 1000 CNG sites in the coming years, and Russia’s top oil producer, Rosneft, plans to allocate 60 billion rubles to building 1,000 stations.

Although some alternative fuels are new to some retailers, the good news for Doms’ customers is that the PSS 5000 already supports most CNG and LPG dispensers.

With several years experience from the world’s largest LPG site in Singapore and Gazenergoseth’s network in Russia, we can see that many of the new LPG/CNG dispensers are compatible with existing fuel dispenser protocols that are supported already. This means that in many situations the current IT (POS) systems on sites connecting to the dispenser via PSS 5000 do not need to be changed – the introduction of these new fuel types is just a matter of a simple configuration change.

In order to expand our support of LPG/CNG, we are currently developing support for LPG tank gauge devices, such as the one illustrated. This development involves creating an interface to the analog output and handling the strap table in the controller. This support will be released shortly and announced here.

An example of a radar sensor for measuring LPG in tanks