The buses are of the "Yutong" make, imported from China, and each can carry up to 139 passengers.
Speaking at the ceremony inaugurating the new buses, Transport Minister Antonio Mungwambe said the introduction of these vehicles resulted from an instruction given by President Armando Guebuza to the government in 2005 to find alternatives to liquid fuels, in order to reduce the country's fuel bill.
"In the case of public transport, these buses will be an experiment", said Mungwambe. "We hope the experiment is successful so that we can import more of them".
The government plans to introduce buses run on gas in other parts of the country, simultaneously introducing the new filling pumps that they must use.
In the case of the four Maputo buses, they currently rely on just one supplier, the gas distribution company "Autogas". Under an agreement with the government, this company will, within the next four months, install a gas pump at the TPM headquarters.
The general manager of Autogas. Andri Hugo, told reporters that fuel costs would be 35-40 per cent cheaper than petrol.
Currently a litre of petrol costs 28.86 meticais and a litre of diesel 25.6 meticais (at current exchange rates there are about 25.8 meticais to the US dollar). But the equivalent amount of natural has costs only 18 meticais.
The "Yutong" bus contains seven cylinders of gas, with a total capacity equivalent to 200 litre. "With this amount, the bus can run for about 400 kilometres", Hugo told AIM.
The natural gas is a Mozambican product, coming from the gas fields in Inhambane province. Bruno Morgado, the chief executive officer of the Matola Gas Company (MGC), the gas distributor, which works with Autogas, said that this natural gas, unlike cooking gas, poses no risk of fire.
Not only does it evaporate at once, but the buses contain a system that cuts off the supply of gas as soon as there is a fire or other incident in the vehicle.
Currently TPM has 80 buses, but only 57 of them are operational. Only 40 are on the roads at any one time, while the others are undergoing maintenance.
TPM makes some additional money by hiring out five buses to companies who use them to transport their workers, and so only 35 remain for the Maputo and Matola travelling public.
SOURCE: AIM
