Berlin's 1st Public LNG Truck Stop Opens

Berlin’s first public LNG filling station for vehicles was inaugurated by Germany’s Uniper on April 25.

The facility was opened by Uniper-owned Liqvis at Grunheide on the orbital A10 motorway in east Berlin on a site owned by German road haulier Meyer Logistik, which will be the facility's anchor customer and will fuel its 20 LNG-powered Iveco trucks that deliver to fast food and coffee stores across Berlin. It had operated for a few weeks prior to its formal inauguration.

The new Berlin filling station received partial EU funding under its ‘LNG Blue Corridor’ which aims to have one LNG filling station on Europe’s principal roads at least every 400km. Specially-equipped trucks can run for 1,500km on a full LNG tank, generating lower fuel costs and emissions than diesel.

Liqvis was set up by Uniper to build LNG filling stations for road hauliers and opened its first such station in Ulm, together with Iveco, in southern Germany in June 2016. That was followed last summer by Liqvis's first wholly-owned LNG filling station at Gardanne, near Marseille in southern France. It plans to extend its LNG filling network shortly with two new German stations, one in Hamburg, and one in the Rhine-Ruhr region.

Germany now has over 900 public CNG (compressed natural gas) filling stations run by a variety of operators, but few also vend LNG for trucks.

Gazprom for many years has built CNG and LNG filling stations for vehicles across Russia and more recently Europe, promoted since 2008 through its annual Blue Corridor motor rally for mass-produced natural gas vehicles.

Mark Smedley