March/April 2012
Alternative fuels can save money and lessen the environmental impact of on-road and off-road scrap vehicles without reducing fuel efficiency or performance, recyclers say.
By Jim Fowler
Every day, drivers for Used Beverage Container Recovery (Wixom, Mich.), a subsidiary of Schupan & Sons (Kalamazoo, Mich.), use the company’s fleet of 16 trucks to pick up aluminum cans, PET containers, and glass bottles from reverse vending machines at 600 Michigan locations. Each truck runs for two 10-hour shifts on routes that can reach 400 miles in length, and each is registered at 54,000 pounds gross combination weight. Powering the M2 112, single-axle (4 x 2) Freightliner tractors are Cummins 8.9-liter ISL G engines that generate 320 hp and 1,000 foot-pounds of torque—and that operate without a drop of diesel fuel. Instead, UBCR claims it’s the first scrap recycling company in the United States to have converted its entire diesel-
powered truck fleet to operate on compressed natural gas.
The company made the switch for several reasons, says CEO Marc Schupan. “Environmentally, it’s great. We’ve done studies of our carbon footprint, and the switch from diesel to natural gas reduces it tremendously.” Further, with the help of government grants and tax credits—and forecasts of continuing low U.S. natural gas prices—the CNG fleet is “going to be more economical than the diesel fleet,” Schupan says. “We did a lot of research and believe that for us, it’s a huge savings.”
Other scrap companies have started running their on-road and off-road vehicle fleets on biodiesel, a fuel made from natural oils such as soy that providers typically sell in a blend with petroleum-based diesel for use in any standard diesel engine. Those that have made the switch to alternative fuels say they’re operating just as efficiently, or more so, with fewer emissions—and they’re saving money.
Natural Gas Know-How
UBCR switched its fleet to CNG in late December 2011, says Chris Milani, Schupan’s vice president of operations and logistics, who managed the project. The company signed a full-service operating lease on the vehicles from Ryder System (Miami), which took advantage of federal grants and tax credits (since expired) for the incremental expense of installing the tractors’ CNG engine and fueling system. UBCR had the vehicles modified in a few ways to suit its needs. First, the standard fuel tank on this tractor consists of five tanks vertically mounted behind the cab that together hold the equivalent of 75 gallons of diesel. To increase each tractor’s range, the company installed an additional tank on the passenger side rail that holds the equivalent of 40 gallons. “With the equivalent of 115 gallons of diesel on board, we have plenty of range to run our routes,” Milani says.
The company also had to ensure it had access to the fueling infrastructure to support those routes. Unlike diesel fuel, CNG is not available at every truck stop. Michigan already had a dozen public CNG stations, but UBCR constructed additional fueling stations in Wixom and Wyoming, Mich., with the help of grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (Washington, D.C.) via the Clean Energy Coalition, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based nonprofit, and MichCon Fuel Services (Detroit), a subsidiary of the state electric utility that stores and distributes natural gas. Technically, MichCon owns the stations, Milani explains. “We pay for the stations through the fuel we purchase, and if others use the stations, that brings our capital obligation down much faster.” It took the help of “strong partners” such as these “to pull this together and bring it to fruition,” Milani says.
By overseeing the stations’ construction, UBCR was able to address a potential drawback of CNG: the time it can take to fill a fuel tank. The more common slow-fill technique can take four to six hours depending on the needed volume, Milani explains. “Our diesel pump operated at nine to 10 gallons a minute, and that was what we wanted to achieve at our CNG fueling stations. Obviously, we didn’t want our drivers spending a lot of downtime fueling at the station.” To increase fueling speed, the stations needed additional compressor capacity to pump the CNG, and the fuel dispensers and the tractors’ fuel system needed a 5000-series transit model fuel receptacle. “We worked with Ryder, and they convinced Freightliner engineering to upgrade from a 3/8-inch line to a ½-inch line on the tractors,” Milani says. “That gave us the ability to fuel at the diesel rate. In addition, we made it easy for the drivers by specifying [the tractors would have] receptacles on both sides of the fuel cabinet mounted behind the cab so they can [add fuel] from either side of the island. We also put two valves on both fueling compartments on both sides of the tractor—a fast-fill and a slow-fill—so that if we were in a pinch, we could pull into a station that might not have fast-fill nozzles.”
One additional preparatory step was orienting the drivers. Initially, and “understandably, a few had misconceptions about natural gas, and we invested time on education and training to put them at ease with the safety factors. Our partners collaborated on this initiative, and the drivers were able to have all their questions and concerns regarding safety and fueling procedures addressed by the experts,” Milani says. “We have a superb class of drivers at UBCR, and we understood they would be integral to the success of the program.” The company “took the approach that this was something we can all do to help the country, our national defense, and to secure our energy interests … to help wean ourselves off of Mideast petroleum,” he says. The drivers “clearly understood and liked that 98 percent of the gas we use is domestically sourced.” Now that they’ve been driving the tractors for a couple of months, the drivers give the vehicles high marks, he adds. They “love the performance of the engine and the power train, especially the Allison transmission.”
The company has been pleased with the vehicles’ performance, too. “The initial fuel economy has been good … right around 5.7 miles per gallon,” Milani says. “That was our target—to get at least where we were with diesel.” To achieve that, however, the company selected tractors with smaller engines than those in its previous fleet. CNG is “about 93-percent as efficient, in terms of [British thermal unit] content, as diesel,” he explains. “We had been using a 13-liter diesel engine [on our tractors], so going with a right-sized Cummins 8.9-liter ISL G engine pretty much made it an even trade on fuel economy.”
More than engine performance and fuel economy, though, the benefit of the switch will be in fuel costs, Milani says. “CNG is considerably less expensive.” Right now natural gas can save a company up to 40 percent on fuel costs when compared with diesel, says Scott Perry, vice president of supply management for Ryder System’s Fleet Management Solutions business segment. Further, “based on the projections we’re seeing from the [U.S.] Energy Information Administration, the spread between diesel and natural gas will continue to grow.” With oil prices rising at a significantly faster rate than U.S. natural gas prices, the EIA expects the gap to widen to 50 percent in 2035, shortening the payback period for the incremental cost of a CNG vehicle.
As for emissions, results vary based on the vehicle engine and drive cycle, but one early study of CNG-fueled UPS delivery trucks found the CNG vehicles had lower tailpipe emissions than their diesel-fueled equivalents: Particulate matter emissions fell 95 percent; nitrogen oxides, 49 percent; nonmethane hydrocarbons, 4 percent; and carbon monoxide, 75 percent. In addition, research by the California Air Resources Board (Sacramento, Calif.) concludes that heavy-duty vehicles using CNG emit 20 percent fewer greenhouse gases than their diesel counterparts.
Buying Biodiesel
Replacing diesel-fueled vehicles with those that run on compressed natural gas creates significant up-front costs—and creates the potential for significant cost savings over time. Another alternative fuel option—biodiesel—seems more like switching a soda machine from Coke to Pepsi products. It’s primarily a matter of finding a supplier.
Biodiesel is diesel fuel made from renewable sources, typically plant oils or animal fat. Suppliers sell it in blends with petroleum-based diesel: B100 is 100-percent biodiesel; B20 is 20-percent biodiesel and 80-percent petroleum-based diesel, and so on. The United States produced about 1 billion gallons of biodiesel in 2011, says Jessica Robinson, director of communications for the National Biodiesel Board (Jefferson City, Mo.), but that’s just a small drop in the fuel bucket. “If you assume on-road use [of diesel fuel] is about 40 billion gallons annually, that puts biodiesel at 2 to 2.5 percent of total demand,” she calculates. Boosting that total are mandates in some states, including Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, that all diesel fuel sold in the state be at least B5, or 5-percent biodiesel. (The Biodiesel Handling and Use Guide by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Golden, Colo.) points out that biodiesel must meet American Society for Testing and Materials standard D6751. It cautions against alternatives sold as biofuel, which might not meet ASTM or U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards.)
Biodiesel is widely available, Robinson says, because it’s produced in almost every state. “When it comes to large operations asking for [it], their fuel suppliers can respond quickly because it’s available in centralized terminals around the country.” The NBB website, www.biodiesel.org, has a searchable database and map of distributors and retailers.
Mervis Industries (Danville, Ill.) switched to a B11 blend of biodiesel in June 2005, after Illinois started offering users a fuel tax credit, says Jim Picillo, director of operations. At the time, soy-based fuel was cheaper than petroleum-based fuel, which resulted in “significant savings,” he says. “Then, as the demand for soy oil rose and the price increased, there was less of a fuel savings, but always the tax savings.” The state’s sales tax is 6.25 percent on petroleum-based diesel, 5 percent on blends of 1- to 10-percent biodiesel (B1 to B10), and zero on B11 or greater biodiesel blends. Mervis now runs 68 on-road trucks and 50 off-road pieces of equipment on B11. In February, both houses of the Illinois General Assembly voted to extend the biodiesel tax credit, which would have expired in 2013, through 2018, Picillo says. The tax credit has generated enough interest that B11 biodiesel is now widely available in the state, he adds.
In his experience, the B11 blend has performance advantages over 100-percent petroleum diesel, Picillo says—at least, over the petroleum-based diesel now sold in the United States. About eight years ago, he explains, “the federal government mandated the use of ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel. For about a year [after that switch], we were having a significant problem with high-pressure, fuel-injection engines on our on- and off-road equipment. We felt we were losing lubricity because of the ULSD fuel. When we switched to biodiesel, the fuel injector problems went away. No engine modification was required.” The NBB’s Robinson confirms this beneficial attribute. “Even a 2-percent biodiesel blend replaces the lubricity lost with ULSD, which eliminates the [need for] any lubricity additives, which is a cost-saving advantage.” The Mervis fleet’s maintenance and operating costs are lower, Picillo adds, and he has had no issues with reliability. All in all, using biodiesel has been “a positive experience for us,” he says.
Using biodiesel also has reduced fleet maintenance costs for Acme Refining (Chicago), says Pat Plumeri, the company’s vice president of operations, and he points out one possible reason: Plant-based oils are solvents, he says, so they clean the engine and help it run more efficiently. Acme switched its 200 trucks and 150 off-road machines to B11 more than two years ago, also to take advantage of Illinois’ fuel tax credit, Plumeri says, and the savings are substantial.
Mervis’ Picillo gives high marks to B11’s fuel efficiency, which has been “equal to or greater than what we had with straight diesel,” he says. The NREL guide explains that No. 2 (petroleum-based) diesel’s energy content is about 120,000 Btu per gallon. B100 biodiesel has about 8 percent less energy content, but B20 is just 1 to 2 percent lower. “Most users report little difference in fuel economy between B20 and No. 2 diesel fuel,” the guide states. The differences become even smaller and less significant as the proportion of biodiesel declines, to the point that “blends of B5 or lower cause no noticeable differences in performance in comparison to No. 2 diesel.” Feece Oil, the Chicago-area fuel supplier to Acme, recommends B11 in the warmer months over blends with more biodiesel for scrap company use. “Once you introduce a 20-percent [biodiesel], you start to see a drop in efficiency—in miles per gallon with trucks or hours per gallon with material handlers,” says Craig Olsby, the company’s director of sales and marketing. He points out, however, that manufacturers such as Ford have designed diesel engines that accept B20 blends—and that diesel engines are themselves getting more fuel efficient and reducing emissions even from petroleum-based fuel.
Olsby recommends soy-based biodiesel over other varieties. Soy is one of the most abundant sources of biodiesel available and is the most tested and proven, he says. Some fuel providers use biodiesel that has been processed from “animal fat from rendering plants and food processors, called tallow,” he explains. “Other inferior biofuels are from used cooking oil from fast-food restaurants and used oil from machines. We think of these as the lower tiers of biofuels out there. … We wouldn’t put them in our own delivery equipment, and, more important,” he says, the company does not recommend them to its customers. Feece buys 100-percent soy biofuel, stores it at its facility, and blends it to meet customer specifications.
Feece Oil provides Acme with a 4,500-gallon tanker truck to fuel its fleet on site. Mervis has its biodiesel delivered to 12,000-gallon storage tanks on its property, but Picillo cautions against stockpiling this fuel. “We turn our tanks over frequently so we don’t have any issues with biological problems,” he says. “If you let soy sit too long, you could get some separation and a fungus growing in the soy that could cause issues. Since we turn our tanks over at least twice a month, that’s not a problem.”
Another potential drawback of biodiesel is that it can begin to jell in cold weather sooner—at temperatures 20 to 30 degrees higher—than petroleum-based diesel. For a few years, Mervis did not use biodiesel in the winter due to this concern, Picillo says, but “over time, that’s proved not to be a problem. We worked with our fuel supplier [to] put some additives in during the winter, and we haven’t had any jelling problems.” The NREL guide confirms that “with proper handling, B20 has been used successfully all year in the coldest U.S. climates.”
What do the drivers think of the new fuel? Initially, “our drivers thought their exhaust was going to smell like French fries,” Picillo says, laughing. The company did not announce when it made the switch to biodiesel, “and our drivers and operators didn’t even notice the change,” he says. “The biggest difference is not having fuel-injector problems.”
From an emissions standpoint, a draft technical report from the U.S. EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality concludes that an average B20 biodiesel blend reduces particulate and carbon monoxide emissions about 10 percent each and hydrocarbons about 20 percent, but it increases nitrogen oxide emissions 2 percent. The researchers were unable to find conclusive impacts, either positive or negative, of biodiesel on emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases.
The Fuel of the Future?
Feece Oil’s Olsby believes diesel fuel still has a strong grip on the economy, but “CNG has gotten a lot of attention lately,” he says. Mervis, for one, is taking a hard look at CNG for its roll-off equipment, but “the significant hurdle is having to build a fueling station,” Picillo says. “The infrastructure doesn’t exist [to make] CNG readily available for your trucks. There might be some opportunities with a roll-off fleet where you’re working in a relatively small radius, but it becomes a question of scale and whether you can partner with someone who has a similar fleet” to share the expense of a fueling station. (To locate CNG fueling stations, go to www.cngnow.com.) If you can overcome the “major” infrastructure investment CNG requires, natural gas’s low prices are attractive, he says.
Others are jumping on the CNG bandwagon. In February, TFC Recycling, a residential and commercial recycler in Chesapeake, Va., announced it added five CNG-fueled curbside collection vehicles to its fleet. The company also has constructed a 20-bay, CNG-compliant maintenance facility, staffed with mechanics certified to work with alternative fuels, that can assist other companies with CNG vehicle conversions and maintenance. It plans to add a natural gas fueling station to the facility as well. Universal Lubricants (Wichita, Kan.) has even created a new engine oil for CNG vehicles, Eco Ultra, which is 83 percent recycled and re-refined material.
The CNG market is in its infancy. Ryder’s Perry estimates that less than 1 percent of on-road vehicles run on natural gas now, and of the 165,000 class-8 trucks manufactured in North America for U.S. distribution in 2011, only 600 were designed to run on natural gas. “It’s a very small percentage with a tremendous amount of room for growth.” On the manufacturing side, the Cummins ISX G 11.9-liter CNG engine, scheduled to go into commercial production later this year, should be able to handle the heavier loads more common in the scrap industry, Perry says, and he expects it will be in high demand in this and other industries. He believes the fueling infrastructure will grow as well. “There is a much broader [potential] CNG fueling infrastructure because of the existing natural gas pipeline in the marketplace that [serves] industrial and area home heating,” he explains. “As we see more production of natural-gas vehicles and more research and development on new engines—along with more competition—we’ll see those investment premiums come down dramatically,” leading to a quicker return on a company’s CNG investment.
Some are more skeptical. Right now, says Feece Oil’s Olsby, the biggest obstacle to switching to CNG is the “front-loaded capital expense” to create a CNG truck fleet. “You need a $500,000 plant on site to handle 15 to 40 trucks, and at least a million-dollar site to handle 75 to 100 trucks.” A new semi truck is $50,000 higher than a normal diesel-powered unit, he says; a retrofit is $25,000 more.
Looking ahead, Olsby wonders how significant growth in CNG vehicles might affect the fuel’s future. The United States has an estimated 100 years’ supply of natural gas, he says, but “if you start to convert a substantial portion of the nation’s equipment, both on- and off-road, 100 years is not really a long period of time. Then what do you do with the equipment once the supply has eroded?”
He also questions the likelihood of continued low natural gas prices. “Right now CNG is pretty affordable,” selling for a national average price of $2.19 in mid-February. “What happens when demand goes through the roof, and we are left with vehicles that cost more to purchase” and that have a limited travel range, as well as a limited fuel supply that costs the same if not more than diesel fuel? With those considerations, he says, “we would be better suited to use CNG to help heat homes.
“There is not one source of alternative fuel that could end our nation’s dependence on foreign oil,” Olsby says. Instead, the country must use “all technologies of alternative fuels to help end our dependence,” though the ultimate goal, he says, “is to use renewable energy sources, such as biofuels.”
Jim Fowler is retired publisher and editorial director of Scrap.
Increasing Efficiency With Traditional Fuels
Yards that are not ready to switch to biodiesel or invest in CNG trucks might still be able to save money and fuel and reduce emissions by increasing fuel efficiency. Fleet and operations managers make these recommendations:
Maintenance. Preventive maintenance is the key to fuel and operating efficiency, says Acme Refining’s Pat Plumeri. “Our shop is open six days a week, 24 hours a day, and we have 30 mechanics working day and night to keep our maintenance on schedule,” he says. “Our trucks are gone over every day and every night by the drivers as well, so they are well-maintained.”
Keep an eye on tire inflation, tire alignment, and aerodynamics, among other points, says Mervis Industries’ Jim Picillo. “You have to take that incremental approach,” he says. “A lot of small things” can improve your fuel consumption, such as “frequent inspections and keeping loads under tarp. We experiment with lots of different things, and they all help. There is no magic bullet. We have 12 mechanics, and our shop is open 24 hours a day, six days a week.”
Monitoring. The Mervis fleet has technology that allows the tracking of many truck functions and performance. “We can plug in our computers, test, and get a cellular-based [message] when a fault code appears,” Picillo explains, “which tells us if we have an issue we need to check with a truck or engine. We can monitor our drivers’ speed and how they are shifting.” To cut down on idling, a big fuel-waster, “our trucks are set to shut down after so many minutes of idling time,” he says. The technology can monitor the fuel efficiency of individual vehicles, speed, braking, and shifting in addition to the mechanical fault codes, he says.
Along the same lines, Acme trucks have GPS tracking, which provides dispatchers with the trucks’ location every two minutes, and other remote system monitoring, Plumeri says. “At the end of the day, it will tell us how much fuel the truck has used, how long it sat in idle—a lot of good information to help us run the business more efficiently.”
Routing. Acme’s three dispatchers geographically centralize routes so drivers don’t overlap or pass each other. Defined and centralized routes also reduce idle time, Plumeri says. He attributes the well-organized routing to the skill of the dispatchers, each of whom had previously been a truck driver.
For routing purposes, roll-offs and trailers are “two different fleets,” Picillo says. “Roll-offs are more of a work fleet that tends to have lower fuel efficiency because they are picking up and dropping off and running at a high idle, consuming a lot of fuel but not really driving anywhere.” To measure the fleet’s efficiency, the company looks at each vehicle’s percentage of miles under load. “We try to have a fleet average above 50 percent. You send a truck out with a load and it comes back empty, 50 percent of [those] miles are under load.” The dispatchers try to arrange for backhaul loads “to maximize the miles we’re actually working. An empty load is not what we call revenue miles,” he points out. The company monitors that metric quarterly.
For more on truck routing and monitoring, see the November/December 2011 Scrap article “Equipment Focus: Fleet-Management Software.” Also, Kenworth Truck Co. published a white paper on fuel economy in 2008 that’s available on its website, www.kenworth.com.