Presentation by Silvia Zamboni Fabio Formentin Andrea Normanno

1. Compro Nantes SeminarEmilia-Romagna’s role in promoting clean vehicle procurement for local public transport Presentation by Silvia Zamboni Fabio Formentin Andrea Normanno

2. Emilia-Romagna regional government competences in transport sector • According to the regional law 30/98 the Emilia-Romagna Regional Government has competences for: • regional mobility budget • former national roads • Road Safety Observatory • regional rails and railway services • urban and suburban pubblic transport • urban sustainable mobility and logistics. • In the field of urban mobility, it is specifically responsible for: • car feed-parks • cicle lanes • restricted traffic zones • implementation of sustainable mobility measures

3. Incentive policy to local public transport • In order to reduce traffic air pollution, the regional government allocates incentives to local public transport (LPT) by • contributing to the bus fleet renewal • supporting researches, meetings and agreements with other local authorities. • The regional strategy aims at: • progressively creating local public transport fleets made up of ecocompatible vehicles • (in relationship to urban areas) supporting modal interchange and traffic fluidification and restriction on the main access roads to towns centres (by means of reserved bus lanes and telecontrol systems).

4. Incentive policy to local public transport The bus fleet in Emilia-Romagna region is made up of about 3300 vehicles: 2700 are diesel buses, 267 are CNG ones, 57 LPG, 107 Hybrids (old and new generation), 33 electric and 129 trolley buses. While national regulations foresee a mandatory percentage of 5% of low impact vehicles to be purchased in each procurement batch, since 2002 onwards Emilia-Romagna’s regional Government has raised this threashold to at least 20% for each order of new vehicles. The last buses orders carried out by pubblic transport companies feature more than 50% low impact vehicles, particularly thanks to fuel shift to natural gas made by the major transport companies in the 13 towns with a population of more than 50 thousands residents.

5. Low impact vehicles • The low impact technologies on which the regional mobility and public transport department is mainly engaged are: • CNG vehicles (18% of urban buses) • electric vehicles • hybrid vehicles • As far as CNG is concerned, the regional governement has promoted the implementation of new depots and refuelling stations in compliance with regulations and according to local needs. • Electric and hybrid vehicles have been promoted by Emilia-Romagna region first of all in urban areas since they help to decrease noise and air pollution (particulate).

6. Further projects developement Hydrogen and hydromethane The regional mobility and public transport department is also carrying out researches on hydrogen vehicles and hydromethane (that is a low emissions fuel blend made up with methane and hydrogen produced from biomass) in order to evaluate its tecnical/economic feasibility and the time needed for a real implementation of this tecnology on bus fleets. Hydromethane Hydromethane is amixture of compressed natural gas (CNG) blended with hydrogen to further improve environmental impact of public CNG vehicles.

7. ‘HYDROMETHANE’ as a new energy vector • The proposed project, besides an increase in energy efficiency, offers some other major benefits: • Conversion of CNG vehicles to HYDROMETHANE (‘green’ Hydrogen/CNG hybrids) • Promotion of the hydrogen energy vector through an already consolidated technology (CNG)

8. Tendencies in terms of fuel technology in Italy A RER’s survey carried out for COMPRO PROJECT highlights that in the next three-years’ period (2008-2010): • Diesel will remain the leading fuel technology for almost all the interviewed companies, particularly with reference to the suburban service; • CNG will increase and be the mostly used alternative to diesel (some companies, such as ATAC Rome, plan to invest totally or almost totally in this technology); • Other fuel technologies, such as hybrid and electric, will remain marginal. • For the LPT companies which were contacted, it is usually difficult to provide definite procurement estimates in advance because the funds availability mainly depends on national and regional financing channels. • As far as the following three-years’ period is concerned (2011-2013), the companies had even more problems in giving an accurate indication of their estimates. For those companies which were able to give such estimates referred to the period 2011-2013, diesel will remain the mostly used technology and CNG will still continue to represent a significant alternative. • It is important to underline that some big Local Public Transport companies (such as for example ATC Bologna, ATM Milan) are thinking of considerably investing on hybrid during the above mentioned three-years’ period 2011-2013, presuming that at that time the hybrid technology will be ripe, both in terms of market costs and reliability.

9. Number of CNG buses per manufacturer Survey for COMPRO carried out by Regione Emilia-Romagna, 2007

10. Thank you for your attention! szamboni@regione.emilia-romagna.it