VW fleet to run on Basel city garbage?

The Basel region of Switzerland doesn’t have electric vehicle makers or any car manufacturers at all for that matter. But it’s not stopping the area from going green.

“We have no car producers, so we have no large initiatives pushing for the hybrid engines,” Stephan Lienin, mobility project coordinator with Sustainserv, told the Cleantech Group today. “It’s also a chance to build something from the bottom up.”

Management consultancy Sustainserv, based in Zurich and Boston, uses its global expertise to help companies drive business growth by integrating environmental performance and social responsibility into what they do. And in this case, it’s working on a sustainable mobility public-private partnership in Basel with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, known as ETH.

The project, called Novatlantis, takes research from the ETH domain and applies it to projects to help drive the adoption of sustainable development in urban areas. One of its first projects for 2010 is being called a near-zero emissions vehicle. The erdgas biogas is a Volkswagen fleet vehicle that runs on biogas produced from green rubbish, Lienin said.

“You can have a set up where the air coming out is cleaner than what is sucked in,” said Lienin, referring to it as a “cleaning machine.”

The project’s fourth generation prototype, which uses catalytic technology, is getting put to a road test over the next year starting in January. Being used by local energy supplier Industrielle Werke Basel (IWB), a partner of Swisspower, the vehicle is expected to service the city and region of Basel.

See a photograph of Erwin Tschan from IWB with the vehicle » 

“This is not a fancy family vehicle,” Lienin said. “We want to tackle the commercial fleet vehicles.”

The erdgas biogas generates less than 120 grams per kilometer of carbon dioxide emissions, compared to a gasoline car that emits 28 percent more CO₂ emissions.

The intent is to put the $30,000 car in a real world setting to see how it compares to lab testing, Lienin said. It costs about CHF 30 (US$29) to fill the car with biogas for a range of about 500 kilometers (310 miles).

Though the catalytic technology out of ETH is new, the concept isn’t. Earlier this year, the UK's third largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury's Supermarkets, announced plans to outfit more of its trucks with hybrid systems that use a combination of biogas and diesel fuel, a dual-fuel technology also being considered by Volvo (see Sainsbury's expands biogas-vehicle trial).

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