Asphalt Industry Seeks Efficiency in Electric Construction Equipment BY SANDY LENDER
Leveraging over 400 Caterpillar advanced power system design patents, the new electric Cat R1700 XE LHD offers 100% battery electric propulsion. It is designed to match the performance of the diesel-powered R1700 while using switch-reluctance (SR) technology that draws from Caterpillar’s 15+ years of electric drivetrain experience and thousands of field application operating hours.
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Editor’s Note: This article includes opinions of the author.
Many members of the asphalt industry have lately contemplated environmental product declarations, product category rules, life cycle cost analysis or net zero mapping. These tools are part of our vernacular in large part because environmental groups have grown nimble in their ability to point out a pavement’s cradle-to-grave greenhouse gas emissions potential, showing how ingredients have been sourced, crushed, transported, produced, and so on. Our community must often remind others of the recyclability of our product to present a complete LCCA that shows the true resilience of an asphalt pavement system. When it comes to the heart of an electric vehicle, we are often shown the magically appearing lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery pack “mid-stream.” I dare you to find an episode of “This is Your Life” for this battery. Instead, many blogs bemoan the horrors of the diesel engine as a CO2 emitter and claim: • all-electric equipment is powered by Li-ion battery packs and • all-electric equipment boasts net-zero carbon emissions. I posit, those two statements offer a dichotomy for us to overcome. It is my understanding that Li-ion battery packs are not a net-zero end game if you are mapping an EPD, LCCA or net-zero plan.
40 / December 2021
A trend I noticed during my research was writers’ propensity to ignore the Tier IV Final advances engine manufacturers have made in recent years. Statements like “[d]iesel-powered vehicles like dump trucks and LHD loaders emit massive amounts of harmful gasses,” courtesy of MarketsAndMarkets, kept catching me by surprise. Our industry has worked overtime to implement EPA emission standards for diesel engines with selective catalytic reduction (SCR) and diesel particulate filters (DPF) where bad actors are converted to harmless water and vapor. In fact, MarketsAndMarkets acknowledged, “as per the US EPA norms, NOx and PM levels have seen a decline of around 95.6% and 96.2%, respectively, from Tier I to Tier IV.” That’s a stat worth shouting from the rooftops.
BATTERY IMPROVEMENTS
Dr. James Edmondson, a senior technology analyst at IDTechEx, specializes in market research for materials and thermal management in electric vehicles and 5G technology. In his look into the portfolio of trends for EV data, published July 8, 2021, he pointed out different material demands between the Li-ion batteries in electric vehicles and the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. He wrote: “Whilst ICE
