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US Partners with Pune, India on Diesel Retrofits and ULSD; Looks for Data for More Effective Strategies

9 September 2006

The United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) has awarded a $296,000 grant to the city of Pune, in India’s Maharashtra state, to retrofit diesel-fueled buses with technologies designed to reduce toxic emissions and utilize low-sulfur diesel fuel, to test those technologies and to perform environmental impact assessments.

The grant is part of a series of anti-pollution cooperative ventures between the United States and India.

Vehicular emissions are responsible for much of India’s urban pollution levels, which are among the worst in the world. Since the early 1990s, several Indian cities have taken steps to improve their increasingly compromised air quality. New Delhi placed limits on emissions for gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles, prohibited the use of vehicles more than 15 years old and introduced buses and taxis powered by compressed natural gas (CNG).

The challenge is for environmental measures to keep pace with India’s population growth, urbanization and industrialization. The USTDA grant aims to tailor technologies to the locations in which they will be used and measure how successful they are in increasing the efficiency of vehicular pollution control.

The object is to get a better understanding of the options that exist and get data on them. Various options are available. A lot of decisions get made without a sense of efficacy or cost.

—Ted MacDonald, US Environmental Protection Agency South Asia Program Director

The data gathered will help evolve more effective strategies. MacDonald cited CNG as an example. In the early days of CNG implementation it was thought that the diesel-to-CNG conversion kit was the answer, but the kits do not live up to expectations. Experience shows the need for dedicated CNG engines. Solid data obtained in Pune might aid in future decision-making elsewhere, he said.

The Pune project will focus on retrofitting buses with diesel particulate filters, diesel oxidation catalysts and other innovative retrofit technologies verified by the EPA or the California Air Resources Board to reduce air pollution. Technology transfer, development and data from the project might yield knowledge that both India and the United States can use.

The long-term goal of the collaboration with the Pune Municipal Corporation and the Nagpur-based National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) is to develop a viable system for Pune that might later be applied in other Indian cities.

Besides its Nagpur headquarters, NEERI has zonal bases in five major Indian cities. Its mission is to promote sustainable development through environmental science and engineering. On the US side, the EPA and the US Agency for International Development are working with NEERI and other local participants to improve urban air quality.

September 9, 2006 in Conversions, Diesel, Emissions, India | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Outsourcing research?

Posted by: Aussie | September 09, 2006 at 03:27 AM

What do call when England was taking salt from India and shipping
to England and reselling at 20 times the cost. million other examples.
Gives us back our money that you stole than you can have
the stinking jobs you call outsourcing.
West is good as dead, the corporations know that
so they are shifting their enterprise to Asia. 100 years ago white man went around the world telling us that we didn't have brains and that they were put on earth
to rule over all the lesser people. What goes around comes back to bite back.
You can bitch all you want. Oh ya, I guess they don't tell you this in your
history books.

Posted by: anon | September 09, 2006 at 10:04 PM

Real world lab conditions ideal for testing of these retrofits.Plenty of engineers {apparently angry ones}to do the work.

As this site attests there is no shortage of research going on here and all over the world.The world economy has lifted tens of millions of Chinese and Indians out of poverty.Perhaps we can do well while doing good.Anon can attest to the results of doing well while ignoring the plight of masses of people.

Posted by: earl | September 10, 2006 at 09:25 AM

Anon:
Catch-up to the leaders is no-brainer. Try to be a leader – then your opinion will count.

Posted by: Andrey | September 11, 2006 at 03:33 AM

I am simply not interested in anyone yelling outsourcing
when an article India is presented.

Plight of the masses. What a
joke or red herring. Communist are always so concerned that poor people are
suffering. socialism was defeated by the west. India's path is to mimic the west
and compete for little scraps. India already tried socialism. It might have worked if India was rich but it is against the interest of the ruling class that the poor be empowered.

It doesn't matter whether I am a leader or my opinion counts or not.
Simply do not come and yell that India is taking away your jobs when they are not your jobs to begin with.

India was once the leader and richest nation in history. Guess what happened.
When we get rich and powerful. Then we can outsource to you. I like to see your kids learning Indian languages, speaking in indian accent, and be talk down to on the phone. Wouldn't that be fun.

I just love it when you have to defend your past. How quickly the subject is changed. Thats right I am angry. I angry at your ignorance and stupidity that
some how past will be forgotten and that 500 years of subjugation of the world
will be forgiven while you continue to say can't we just get along and why do they hate us.

Posted by: anon | September 11, 2006 at 12:23 PM

Wow, I guess we need to stop giving visa's for students to come from India and take advantage of our graduate engineering & science programs...they will just be angry for some reason or another.

This [article] certainly addresses the question of rapidly growing economic powers suddenly excarbating the pollution problem on a rapid and short time scale. Transfer of technologies and research can head it off to keep them from going down the decidedly dirty path we already tread in the 60s and 70s.

Posted by: Patrick | September 11, 2006 at 01:45 PM

I would like to see Toyota, for one, to really put money and engineering behind the retrofit efforts, for in my experience in Costa Rica,(and I would expect worldwide) they have put (hundreds of?)thousands of heavily polluting diesels in cars,vans and trucks, that never seem to die, but continue to emit noxious emissions.

Posted by: Richard C Burton | September 11, 2006 at 03:49 PM

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