Fueling the future
72 Commercial Carrier Journal November 2008 With no miracle fuel on the horizon, truck makers weigh near-term alternatives to standard diesel. By Jack Roberts I f there is such a thing as a Holy Grail in the world of alternate fuels, it would be hydrogen. It is truly a miracle fuel: Cheap, safe, abundant and since it's mostly water atoms renewable. But while hydrogen may show promise as a fuel of the distant future, alternate fuels we're likely to see in the near term will, for the most part, depend on some percent-age of fossil fuels to work properly. But global factors now are trending against cheap and abundant petro-leum-based automotive fuels. Andy Douglas, national sales manager of specialty products for Kenworth Trucks, says the truck maker has been working closely with Boone Pickens. He's a firm believer that oil production capacity is not going to get a whole lot larger, Douglas says. Demand is going to outstrip it particularly world demand coming out of Asia. So we've got to figure out another way of doing some things. And I think we're there. The challenge for truck and engine manufacturers is two-pronged: What can they do in the near term to ease environmental concerns and help a fleet's bottom line, and what can they do in the long term to end our depen-dency on fossil fuels permanently? A big part of the challenge, experts say, is that diesel is unfairly maligned in some quarters. It's high in power density, making it efficient compared to other fuels, and thanks to low-emissions diesel technology has turned into one of the cleanest fuels now in existence. Truck and engine makers often argue that when the next generation of clean diesels enters the market in 2010, diesel trucks will serve as mobile air scrub-bers, since their exhaust emissions may be cleaner than the air they draw into engines in the first place. In the near term, our choices are fairly limited in terms of what we can do, Douglas admits. Long term, we're working every day on things you've heard of like hydrogen and things you haven't heard of. And there's a lot of `man in the moon'-type technology out there that may Skeptics of natural gas argue that because the infrastructure is so imma-ture, it currently is suitable only for fleets that return regularly to a home base within reach of city gas mains.