And while a one percent improvement in fuel economy may not get those of you in the heavy construction business too excited, another piece of news from last week only reinforced the importance of what Shell’s experts were telling us.
The EPA has released their draft fuel economy rules for medium and heavy duty diesel trucks, and as you might expect, the agency is hoping to wring every last drop of diesel out of everything bigger than a one-ton truck.
Suddenly that one percent looms large.
The EPA cites greenhouse gas emissions as its reason for further improving fuel efficiency. The gas in question is carbon dioxide and the only way to reduce carbon dioxide is to burn less fuel. Burn a gallon of diesel and you put about 22 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Reducing this means either better fuel economy or less work. So we can only hope that the equipment designers, the oil companies and everybody else in the industrial world figures out more and better ways to improve fuel economy. Otherwise, less work means fewer profits, jobs, and a lower GDP.
Dan Arcy, Shell’s global OEM technical manager and industry trade association liaison notes that a one percent improvement in fuel economy for on-highway trucks would reduce carbon dioxide emitted by diesel trucks by 4,000 tons annually. That’s the same as removing 23,000 trucks from the road. And current testing of the low viscosity oils would seem to indicate that a one percent improvement in fuel economy is conservative.
