Page 237 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 237

 There are still millions of dollars left in the Carl Moyer Fund. You just have to qualify.
– Grant Stickney, Emissions Solutions manager, Peterson-Cat
  CAT’S INVOLVEMENT
Caterpillar has been deeply entrenched in the emissions issue from the very beginning. Part of their strategy has involved dropping any product that doesn’t meet a certain profitability threshold. “It’s all about PINS, or market share,” says Stick- ney. “It takes a huge amount of time and money to build a machine that meets the new emissions standards. So they dropped some models, like the Cat 527 skidder. There’s only about a hundred of them sold a year. Twenty-five go to California, the Pacific Northwest and Canada. The rest are sold in Indonesia where they’re built. The demand is too low for Cat to allocate resources to develop a Tier 4 solution.” Both the 613 and 615 scrapers have also been cut from Caterpillar’s product line. Any machine in the future that doesn’t meet Cat’s pro- duction volume litmus test will be vulnerable.
Electrification is another technology Cat contin- ues to pursue to help reduce emissions. The elec- tric-drive D7E is a great example. It debuted in 2008 and won the EPA’s Clean Air Excellence Award that same year for innovative reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. “The D7E was designed to capture some of its own energy and reuse it to further propel the machine,” says Stickney. “It’s a much more efficient machine than its predecessor. And it receives hybrid credits similar to electric cars.” At Bauma 2019, the construction industry’s largest trade fair in the world, Cat introduced its D6 EX dozer, which replaces the D7E. They also debuted their new 988K EX wheel loader, the 300.9D VPS mini excavator, and the 906 compact wheel loader—all electric-drive models—during the week-long tradeshow in Germany.
Caterpillar also has a number of electric-drive mining trucks, plus the hybrid 336E H excavator, introduced in 2012. “The 336E H isn’t electric, but it has a hydraulic system with high-pressure ac- cumulators that store energy,” says Stickney. “No matter what the technology is, if you’re recycling
energy to do further work, you’re reducing emis- sions and improving efficiency.”
The final target stops in 2023. From there, things level off. Customers will have to meet that stan- dard or continue to turn over 10 percent of their fleet each year until they do. “The regulations have not changed from the beginning in 2010. It just keeps getting harder and harder to attain the fur- ther down the road you get,” says Stickney. “There are still millions of dollars left in the Carl Moyer Fund. You just have to qualify.”
After 2019, for instance, large fleets of 5000 horsepower or more can no longer apply for die- sel-to-diesel grants. “That means they can no longer replace an old diesel engine with a newer, cleaner one. But they can apply for replacing a die- sel with an electric. The problem is Caterpillar and other engine manufacturers haven’t come up with an electric engine, like a Tesla-style electric D7. We just don’t have that yet.”
 For now, Stickney focuses on what he can do for his customers. “Somebody will call me up with a bid, wanting to know what options he has. After I study the specifics of the bid, I’ll tell him, for example, that his job can’t produce more than sixty tons of NOx per day. Their usual response? ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’That’s my job— to figure it out.”
CHAPTER 14 | 235
 























































































   235   236   237   238   239