Beijing enlarging its fleet of clean-energy buses

The Chinese capital expects to have 3,155 clean-energy buses powered by liquefied natural gas up and running this year, according to Beijing Public Transport Holdings (BPT), which will bring the total number of this kind of bus in use in the city to 5,681.

Buses using renewable-energy or clean-energy account for about 40 percent of the city’s buses, according to the transportation authority, and it has started energy-saving reconstruction work on all buses so that environmentally friendly ones will account half its total by the end of 2014, and 60 percent by the end of 2017.

BPT said all the Beijing buses had already met or even exceeded the National Emission Standards III(equivalent to Euro III standards), in 2012. Now, the use of green technology in transportation is expected to cut about 1.52 million tons of emissions, including 0.39 million tons of carbon monoxide, 1.07 million tons of nitrogen-oxygen compounds, and more than 52 tons of PM 2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter), every year.