A Clean Fuel to Boost Incomes
Compressed Natural Gas has been around since the 1980s. Through an ADF-supported project, it has finally taken off in Dhaka.
As with other big cities in Asia, Dhaka suffers from high levels of pollution, much of it caused by vehicular traffic. This teeming city of more than 10 million people has roads that are noisy and busy, filled with buses, cars, “auto rickshaws,” cycle rickshaws, and trucks.
Yet Dhaka in recent years has managed to cut pollution down drastically. Measured in particulate matter, pollution came down about 60% between 2001 and 2004, said Abdul Wadud, Managing Director, Rupantarita Prakritik Gas Company Limited (RPGCL).
RPGCL can certainly take some of the credit for this. The company was charged with introducing compressed natural gas (CNG) in Bangladesh and making this environmentally friendly fuel readily available for use. To this end, RPGCL has opened CNG filling stations and set up conversion workshops for vehicles so that they can switch to CNG. The company has also helped to convert many of Dhaka’s smoke-belching buses to “green” vehicles using CNG, which is much kinder to the environment than the traditionally favored fuel: diesel.
