ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES Ӏ SPECIAL REPORT
REvoLuTIoN GREEN
Lifting is overwhelmingly powered by fossil-fuel diesel. How can it become sustainable? Julian Champkin finds encouraging progress towards a carbon-neutral industry.
Crane company Ainscough is to run its entire fleet on hydrogenated vegetable oil, known as HVO for short. HVO is a substitute for diesel fuel – but when it is properly sourced, as Ainscough has pledged, it is a sustainable and renewable fuel that is carbon neutral. It does not add to the CO2 in the atmosphere that is a main cause of climate change. And diesel engines can run on it perfectly satisfactorily, with no need for adjustments to the engine and without any loss of performance. Ainscough has more than 400 cranes and 30 or more heavy transport vehicles; they will all be run on HVO. This, Ainscough clims, makes it the first first crane company in the world to adopt HVO across its fleet. The move will reduce the
company’s CO2 emissions by 95%, or 14,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Ainscough intends to go further. An additional 5% reduction has been achieved with other energy-saving initiatives, which include using the UK’s residual carbon offsetting scheme. Ainscough as a company will therefore be carbon neutral from April of this year – essentially, from the time that you read this article. It is a considerable, and a
praiseworthy, achievement. It is also a necessary one, if the balance of life on the planet is to remain as we know it. Others in the industry –
34 CRANES TODAY
Ainscough’s crane fleet is zero-emission
crane manufacturers and crane and heavy lift operators - are moving the same way. Yet lifting is an industry where almost from the start of industrialisation fossil-fuel diesel has been the most practicable, and almost the universal, source of energy. Eliminating diesel from the crane operations is neither simple, nor always straightforward. Electricity is the obvious
alternative energy source, and manufacturers have been bringing out mains-powered and battery- powered cranes, as well as hybrids
that use a combination of internal combustion and electric. Hydrogen fuel cells are another option – a constant stream of the gas is fed in to them, and electricity comes out. Non-electrical options include HVO, as we have seen, or hydrogen as an internal combustion fuel. The UK government has a ‘Hydrogen Policy’ document for replacing gas home heating with piped hydrogen by 2050; that might or might not result in hydrogen refuelling outlets for vehicles becoming available at normal petrol stations. f
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