Despite its compact Civic sedan, which has compressed natural gas (CNG)-fueled powertrain, being discontinued earlier in 2015, Honda has just opened its first CNG refuelling station at its campus in Marysville, Ohio.
Honda Motor Co. was one of North America's leading proponents of natural gas in vehicles for more than 16 years. Even its Civic had factory-installed CNG-fueled powertrain from 1998 to 2015.
But CNG Civic wasn't able to catch on and was discontinued in 2015, despite being one of North America's best-selling cars. Despite these facts, Honda still refocused its efforts on supplying CNG.
Honda knows that the market for natural gas vehicle (NGV) in North America comes in fleet and commercial customers, not individual car owners. This is one of the major reasons why Honda opened up its first CNG refuelling station in its campus located at Marysville, Ohio.
The campus is one of the giant car manufacturer's first and biggest automotive assembly plant in North America.
It is also Honda R&D America's headquarters, manufacturing 440,000 vehicles annually. It is one of the largest numbers of vehicles manufactured in North America with hundreds of deliveries per day, making it an ideal place for a CNG refuelling station.
The Natural Gas Refuelling Infrastructure of Navigant Research reports that the number of CNG refuelling station in North America is seen to grow to just more than 1,800 in the next 10 years from the present 1,560.
That is a compound annual growth rate of only 1.7%. In a worldwide scale, the number of stations is predicted to grow at 4.0% in the next 10 years.
According to Honda spokesman Eric Mauk, they have designed the station to have a capacity to hold 2.5 million gallons per year. As of now, it is fuelling over 1.0 million gallons annually, which translates to 75-80 fuelling events every day.
If it holds its maximum capacity of 2.5 million gallons a year, it would see 200 fuelling events every day.
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