Biofuels improve air quality in Craiova and cut costs
The evaluation of the results from the introduction of biofuels in Craiova has shown real benefits in terms of air quality and cost reductions.
In recent years, air quality in cities has received lots of attention from many public authorities, research institutions and the business sector. The City of Craiova is well aware of the need to ensure good air quality and is working towards achieving this goal by different interventions. The introduction of a blend of biodiesel and petroleum on ten buses of the public transport operator in Craiova (RAT) is one of these interventions. As part of the CIVITAS project, ten buses were equipped with filters that allow them to run on biodiesel. RAT ran test on two buses with different blends of up to 20 percent biodiesel and selected the B20 blend with 20 percent biodiesel for ten buses to assess their performance under real-life conditions. The evaluation of the experiment demonstrate real benefits for RAT in terms of reduced operational costs by 6.37 percent. It also contributes to an improvement of the quality of life in the city with emission reductions of 2.68 percent for the buses running on the B20 blend. The performance of the buses was evaluated by three indicators: Operational costs; Fuel efficiency; and CO, CO2 and NOx emissions. These indicators were assessed before and after the implementation of the project. The positive post-measure data encourages up-scaling the measure. In addition, the experience from other cities that have been using biofuels for a long time now without any problems makes Craiova confident that the technology is mature enough for a wide application.
