Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

Truckers have long used APU technology to provide the creature comforts of climate control in their cabs.  This technology uses a fraction of the fuel of a diesel engine, but with increasing fuel prices and the push for companies to go green the savings simply isn’t enough.

Delphi and Peterbilt have green in their minds with their latest innovations in APU technology.

Dephi’s new APU used solid oxide fuel cells to run a Peterbilt 386’s electrical system and AC all without idling or depleting battery power.  The test mimicked a truckers average day and ran successfully for a solid 10 hours (the amount of rest required for every 11 hours of driving).  The SOFC APU provided an average of 800 watts of energy throughout the test.

According to Delphi this new solid oxide fuel cell APU technology has a long list of benefits to the old APU technology.

It’s great that people are getting motivated to do something about our energy crisis. And yes, it is a crisis, not only because of the high cost, but the security of the country shouldn’t be dependent on foreign governments. The global oil market is not a “market”, it’s a small group of countries that control the supply while everyone’s demand is going up and most of those countries don’t like us and now that China is becoming a huge consumer of their product, they really don’t care if we live or die anymore.

T. Boone Pickens is big into wind and solar energy and natural gas. Not sure where trucking fits into any of those, but he does show that Natural Gas powered cars can and do work and would be a big benefit. But even if every single four-wheeler was running on natural gas or electricity, diesel is still a world wide commodity and is in very big demand everywhere, not just in the US. But it would lower the overall demand for oil which would lower the price of oil which hopefully would also lower the price for diesel. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since I first mentioned the idea of a hybrid truck. Since then things have been happening.

A brief search on Google provides this.

Additionally we have Peterbilt

August 22, 2007, Bellevue, Washington – PACCAR and Eaton Corporation announced today that they have entered into an agreement to jointly develop proprietary hybrid technology for heavy-duty commercial vehicles in North America. The innovative new products will be introduced exclusively in Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks in the North American market, targeted for initial production by the end of 2009.

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I’ve heard many arguments about the fuel price crisis lately. We’ve all received quite an education on oil and it’s effect on the economy. I was quite surprised to find out something new from a Hollywood type like Ben Stein. He was on Glenn Beck discussing the oil scams and debating how we could become oil independent if the will was there.

He commented that Germany ran out of oil when their supplies were cut off in World War II. Under dire circumstances and heavy bombardment, they still managed to have plentiful supply of synthetic oil from coal. Here’s a long-winded link about how they did it. I found it very interesting that home heating oil and diesel make up 90% of the content when the oil is extracted. Sure, it’s not easy or cheap, and the Germans had a plentiful supply of slave labor, but it wasn’t difficult enough to slow their war machine.

If the Germans could do this back then under bad circumstances, what is our hold back to switching technologies now? I’m not saying coal is the total answer, I’m thinking that we have the technology to use coal and numerous other sources, other than just ethanol, to come up with a solution that works well. Like Ben said, the will just is not there. The will was never there at any other time that a supply crisis was claimed either.

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As I wrote in a previous post. Fuel prices are high and they’re going to STAY high.

And this is a GOOD thing.

(boink!!!!!!!???, this is a good thing? How can that be? Stay tuned, more on that later)

Whatever can we do?

Well, buying a new truck is right out. I checked into that this last month. To replace my old KW it would cost me just about TWICE what I paid for it about nine years ago. Not quite but almost. I paid ninety something thousand in the year two thousand and the local KW dealer wants almost a hundred and seventy thousand for a very similar replacement.

And the new truck get’s worse fuel economy.

So no thank you. I’ll overhaul and rebuild for a while.

How long a while?

That’s kind of what THIS post is about.

Things are being done. It’s possible to get diesel from other places than an oil well,

from plants, algae and trash.

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This country’s fuel prices has gotten so out of hand, that our “American” truckers are going to “Mexico” fuel stops to fill up. It’s approximately $2.00 cheaper in Mexico per gallon than it is here in the USA. I do not know about you all, but this is making me sick to my stomach. What kind of country do we live in where the Government is pushing our Transportation industry to such an extreme as to fuel their vehicles in another country? It’s cheaper for owner ops to purchase the permits for Mexico, then drive to Mexico to fill up.
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With the cost of fuel at about four dollars a gallon it’s getting pretty expensive to get a good night’s sleep. My little kitty slurps about a gallon to a gallon and a half an hour at idle. That figures to about (gulp) four to six dollars AN HOUR! The cost for idling all night will pay for a motel room many places. Which, now that I mention it, is what I, and a lot of heavy haulers do on occasion. If you’ll notice there are a lot of daycab heavy haulers. Many of them are not local they’re long haul like us, but use a motel every night.

Personally I don’t like motels, but that’s just me.

So what other options are there?

Well there’s ShorePower and a company that now calls itself ShorePower

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BioFuels

Things are happening in the field (excuse the pun) of BioFuels. In case you’re not altogether clear on what BioFuels are my favorite “quick reference” source, Wikipedia, has a nice article on it.

Of the many energy related blogs that I follow these days are some of the more interesting and recent developments.

From New Energy and Fuel

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Bio-diesel is probably NOT the right word, since it has nothing to do with anything “Bio”.

There’s this little outfit in New Mexico called Los Alamos National Laboratory. You may have heard of them? They KNOW energy. They’ve done “stuff” in regards to energy…..lots and lots of stuff.
They’ve come up with what they call “Green Freedom”. Believe it or not the idea is to make fuel from air.

Riiiiiight!

Actually it’s for real. Conceptually it’s no big deal. Motor Fuel, be it gasoline, alcohol or diesel is basically long carbon chains intertwingled with hydrogen. Usually this combination of carbon chains and hydrogen ,(and other less desirable stuff), is “mined” in the form of crude oil and then refined into various types of petroleum products including gasoline and diesel.

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Nope, I’m not dispensing any answers in this post; I’m just asking questions. Asking questions, though, as Martha would say, is a good thing. Questions demand answers, answers require thought, thought requires critical analysis and critical analysis can lead to the revelation of both problems and the solutions to those problems.

In Part 1 of this post I asked several general questions but only detailed a few of them. In this final installment I’ll do my best to detail the remaining questions and sum up. Don’t think, by any stretch, I’m asking all the questions though.

I’m not even asking all the questions I’ve thought of let alone all the questions that could, and probably have been, asked by others who are far more informed than I am ever likely to be.

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