“The big three of Iran, Pakistan and Argentina are now followed by United States, China and Russia working hard. As of end March 2013, natural gas vehicles (NGV) diffused over the world numbered 17 million, and there has been a constant increase at the pace of 14.6% every year during the past five years. There are 21,000 locations having NGV filling stations with a growth rate of 9.8%, which accounts for 1.5% of all automobiles.

Our country has also been tackling the diffusion of NGV since a very long time ago. However, Japan is still positioned at a semi-advanced country ranked at 24th of an accumulated number of 40,000 vehicles with 329 filling stands as of March 2012.

In terms of the diffused number of NGV in the world, Iran ranks at top with 3.3 million vehicles, Pakistan at the second place with 3.1 million and Argentina at the third with 2.1 million. These top three altogether dominates nearly half of all over the world.

According to the International Association for Natural Gas Vehicles, during 2012 there was a domestic demand for natural gas in Iran and Pakistan of about 150 billion Nm3 and 40 billion Nm3 respectively, 40% and 70% of which were consumed for NGV respectively.

In the US the number of NGV is still small of 110,000, but with the increased self-sufficiency rate of natural gas caused by the discovery of shale gas, there is a boomed attention to NGV. In 2011, about 80 billion yen was invested in the development of infrastructure for NGV in 2011, and a tax benefits system was introduced for passenger cars or household filling equipment in 2012. In response, Honda (Civic Natural Gas) who had been selling with only 71 distributors on a small scale in four states started to expand its sales activities to 36 states for selling the 2012 model cars.

In China, on the other hand, there has been a boost doubling the accumulative number of NGV in 2012 from the previous year since they put a new article of “Transportation Field” into the priority application items of natural gas in October 2012.

In Russia, Gazprom of governmental enterprise invested about one billion rubles into the NGV market as part of “Russian Gasification Program” of 34.4 billion rubles. The development of infrastructure is underway the 69 domestic districts which participate in the program.

Having such a national policy, each country is expected to expand its NGV market.”