GE Developing At-Home Refueling Station for Natural Gas Vehicles

As part of a program with ARPA-E, GE researchers, working with Chart Industries and the University of Missouri, is developing an affordable at-home refueling station for natural gas vehicles that would meet ARPA-E’s target of $500 per station and reduce re-fueling times from 5-8 hours to less than 1 hour.

Natural gas prices are at an all-time low and the number of natural gas vehicles is increasing, but several barriers are preventing greater adoption of this vehicle technology.

These include the inconvenience and low availability of refueling stations and limited driving range of natural gas vehicles.

At-home refueling stations are sold today, but are expensive (~$5000) and require long re-fueling times. The 5-8 hours required to refuel an natural gas vehicle often leaves overnight re-fueling as the only the viable option for vehicle owners. While these barriers can be more easily managed by established fleets, they are not practical for passenger vehicles parked in the driveway or garage at home.

Today, the number of natural gas vehicles globally is estimated at around 15 million, with more than 250,000 in the U.S. Most are fleet vehicles such as buses and delivery trucks, but they include some passenger cars as well. With further improvements in the infrastructure to support natural gas vehicles, the market penetration could be much higher.

One of the keys to enabling a more robust, cost-effective infrastructure is to provide more affordable and convenient re-fueling options. The at-home refueling station under development by GE, Chart Industries and the University of Missouri could meet this challenge.

The refueling station design being worked on is fundamentally different from how today’s re-fueling stations operate. Today’s systems rely on traditional compressor technologies to compress and deliver fuel to a vehicle. The research team from GE, Chart Industries and the University of Missouri will design a system that chills, densifies and transfers compressed natural gas more efficiently. It will be a much simpler design with fewer moving parts, and that will operate quietly and be virtually maintenance-free.

The total cost of the 28-month program will be approximately $2.3 million, which will be shared by ARPA-E and GE. As part of the program, GE researchers will focus on overall system design integration. Chart Industries and University of Missouri will address the detailed engineering, cost and manufacturability of the key system components.

The goal of this program is to deliver and demonstrate a fully functioning at-home refueling station unit. To accelerate the adoption of natural gas as a transportation fuel, GE recently introduced the CNG In A Box technology which takes natural gas from a pipeline and compresses it on-site at an industrial location or at a traditional automotive refilling station to then turns it into CNG, making it faster, easier and less expensive for users to fuel up natural gas vehicles.