Natural gas fuelling station

In recent years, Valorsul has not been indifferent to the growing global concern about the oil crisis, pollution in cities and climate change, and decided that it wanted to be part of the solution. With the partnership of the municipalities it serves, it planned to transport household waste in its area of intervention with natural gas-powered vehicles. But this required a refuelling station, which the company decided to build and manage, and which was granted licence number 1 in Portugal by order of the Ministry of Economy and Innovation.
As is well known, the use of natural gas (NG) as a motor fuel brings environmental benefits compared to traditional fuels, as it is associated with lower pollutant emissions, such as SO2, NOx, CO2 or particulates, as well as a significant reduction in noise.
The use of CNG instead of diesel in waste transport contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gases. Considering that the fleet of CNG waste collection vehicles travels 679,500 km annually, there is an annual reduction of 119 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, which corresponds to an 11% decrease in emissions compared to diesel.

To promote the use of natural gas, Valorsul also offered its shareholder municipalities 28 vehicles for transporting waste at a cost of around 4.8 million euros. Investment in the CNG refuelling station totalled 1.4 million euros. The station was inaugurated on 3 June 2008 and has been in regular operation since then.
Valorsul was a pioneer in encouraging the use of CNG as a fuel for municipal waste collection vehicles and showed that it is possible to take concrete and economically interesting measures with direct and immediate benefits for the environment and society. In the future, we hope to see the reproducibility of this project with other organisations running new professional fleets of CNG vehicles. In the long term, we also hope that private vehicles will be able to take advantage of CNG, including from our petrol station.