The Minister of Transportation Sa’idu Alkali has revealed that the federal government has commenced conversion of railway locomotive engines from diesel to Compressed Natural Gas CNG).
The minister who disclosed this on Monday during an inspection on the retrofitting exercise at Idu train station in Abuja said that if successful, the locomotive engines would work on 70 percent diesel and 30 percent gas.
Alkali, while speaking on the sidelines shortly after the inspection, explained that the process is currently at an advanced stage as the engine is designed in such a way that the diesel is used to power the engine after which it is switched to gas.
His words: “We started in the last one month, Nigeria is the first African country to convert diesel engine to gas, the engine will work 70 percent on diesel and 30 percent on gas.
“At the start of the locomotive, you use diesel ones and after starting it, you switch to gas.”
“So far, we have interacted with the engineers and the process is at an advanced stage and we are going to test run the engine tomorrow and then determine when we will roll out the CNG locomotives” he stated.
Alkali added that the conversation would bring down the cost of maintenance by about 60 to 70 per cent as well as control emission given that once the locomotive move to gas there won’t be gas emissions
He, however, said that the process would begin with the Abuja-Kaduna railway corridor given that the workshop for the conversion is in Abuja, noting that they intend to move to other corridors soon.
