NGVAmerica Holds First Technology & Development Committee Meeting

The NGVAmerica Technology & Development Committee kicked off this past week at Gas Technologies Institute (GTI) in Des Plaines, Illinois.  The meeting was well attended with over 35 NGV industry experts meeting in person.  The committee has been re-constituted within NGVAmerica and is chaired by Ron Eickelman, Agility Fuel Systems, and co-chaired by Cherif Yousef, Southern California Gas.  The committee identified the following areas of focus:  fuel system inspection, maintenance facility modifications, gas quality, codes & standards, cylinder end of life, LNG, incident investigation & root cause analysis, research & development, emissions, and rail & marine.

The committee identified that the most pressing areas are fuel system inspection and maintenance facility modifications.  The fuel system inspection has a few open questions that will be addressed by the committee:  Who should be inspecting?  What should be inspected?  When should the inspection take place?  And how detailed of an inspection should be required?  Maintenance facility modifications was a topic that seemed to garner the most interest from committee members.  This committee will work with authorities having jurisdiction to address inconsistencies in the codes and standards by requesting revisions to the standard development organizations.

Work groups, championed by members, are being set up to identify goals and measurements of success for 2016.