The scrappy Diesel Technology Forum quietly rebranded itself as the Engine Technology Forum (ETF) 10 months ago, acknowledging that despite fighting the good fight for the long-established truck fuel, its name wasn’t helping its cause.
A necessary change
A Google search found exactly one story and the forum’s press release from October about the name change. Truck Tech doesn’t regularly cover diesel. We flat-out missed the name change. An ETF spokesperson wondered how that happened since its news releases were routinely opened and read.
That dogged the ETF in other places when it was the DTF.
“For us to be effective in this new landscape of conversation that’s out there, you have to understand how people are talking about issues and technologies,” Allen Schaeffer, the advocacy group’s executive director, told me this week. “We definitely saw there was a shift away from just talking about diesel.”
A rebranding involving a single word change might seem easy. It wasn’t.
“We did our share of focus group work and stakeholder surveys to understand how other folks were looking at that issue,” Schaeffer said. “And somebody joked to me, ‘My gosh, you spent a whole year in this process and all you did was change one word of your name.’”
Schaeffer initially took umbrage. “After I let my blood pressure simmer back down, I started to realize that’s true,” he said.
Expanding its range of topics
The ETF talks about more than clean diesel powertrains, the focus of the group before the name change. Natural gas, biofuels and hydrogen all get some attention. It even gives a nod to electric powertrains, acknowledging they have use cases in the energy transition. That does not include long-haul, over-the-road trucking, which is 97% powered by diesel.
The ETF at the end of July issued a 40-page white paper titled “Powering On: Internal Combustion Engines & the Clean Energy Future” that lays out why that’s the case. A few highlights:
- About 200 million new internal combustion engines manufactured a year.
- More than 1.3 billion internal combustion engines power vehicles around the world.
- ICE powertrains dominate passenger, freight transport, construction, farm, industrial and power generation globally.
- Annual growth rates for ICE could be as much as 9% a year between 2023 and 2030.
- In the largest commercial vehicles, ICE projects as the power source for 75% of new vehicles.
Biden administration puts thumb on the scale
Schaeffer sees the Biden administration pitting fossil fuels against electrification. The grid has its own purity issues depending on how the electricity is made. Renewable sources such as solar and wind are clean. A coal-fired electric grid is not.Billions of taxpayer dollars are flowing into electrification and infrastructure subsidies and purchase incentives. That further tips the scales away from diesel, which while made from petroleum, is orders of magnitude cleaner than it was a few decades ago.
“They talk about being technology-neutral,” Schaeffer said. “But I would argue strenuously that they’re not. And they’ve been particularly bad about diesel. All those things fueled a mindset out there in the public and stakeholder audiences and online social media that ‘Yeah, diesel, it’s got to go, man. It’s like a bad thing.’”
That helps explain why the ETF jettisoned diesel from its name.
“Say what you want about it. Label it whatever you have to. But at the end of the day, it’s the thing getting the job done,” Schaeffer said. “And it’s going to continue to be part of the future whether you like it or not.”
A fuel-agnostic approach
Cummins Inc., a world leader in diesel engine manufacturing, takes a fuel-agnostic approach. Diesel will remain dominant for years if not decades. Using the same 15-liter engine, the company plans natural gas, diesel and hydrogen variants of its internal combustion engines.
Cummins recently told analysts it was pulling back on the projected growth of its Accelera by Cummins unit where fuel cells, integrated electronic power systems and electrolyzer production for making hydrogen offset the 105-year-old company’s focus on diesel engines.
Hydrogen, once seen as strictly for fuel cells in the transportation space, could find traction as a drop-in fuel for ICE. European governments already are willing to consider minor amounts of nitrogen oxides (NOx) produced by hydrogen-powered engines as zero emissions. If the U.S. follows with similar regulations, hydrogen ICE could gain a foothold.
Cummins next week will open its 50-year-old Jamestown, New York, engine plant to show off the diesel variant of its new X15 big bore engine. It will comply with 2027 Environmental Protection Agency rules for dramatically reduced smog-forming NOx.
“It really was laughable to think that there’s going to be this clean energy revolution in just a few short decades,” Schaeffer said. “This is even [harder] than turning a cruise liner in the ocean. If you wanted to turn right in a thousand miles, you’ve got to start turning now. Don’t expect the ship to hang a right-hand turn as soon as you hit the button.”
Advice to a new administration: Don’t take sides
Schaeffer takes pride in his organization’s “fact-based broker” approach that avoids hysteria in favor of what needs to happen to make engines more efficient. He urges whichever party that wins the presidency to avoid picking winners and losers.
“I think a new Democratic administration would be wise to think about the idea that maybe too much emphasis has been put on one technology,” he said, pointing to tens of billions of taxpayer dollars allocated for electrification through the 2023 Infrastructure and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act.
“If you have a Republican administration, there’s a lot of concern about what would happen to all these investments we’re getting into around decarbonizing the economy. Because so much money has been distributed, there’s probably no turning back.”
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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and watching. Click here to subscribe and get Truck Tech delivered to your email on Fridays. And catch the latest episodes of the Truck Tech podcast and video shorts on the FreightWaves YouTube channel.Send your feedback on Truck Tech to Alan Adler at aadler@firecrown.com.
