The Great Louisville Debate
This Editorial appears in the March 23 print edition of Transport Topics.
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SCR vs. Advanced EGR: The face-off in Louisville had all the earmarks of a hotly contested debate, with competing manufacturers and suppliers assembling their best arguments and putting on their most compelling displays while attempting to sway opinion as to why one 2010 clean-engine technology is better than the other.
The Mid-America Trucking Show provided a fitting stage for an unusual toe-to-toe over machine design. This is a fork in the road unlike anything truck operators have seen in the development to this point of environmentally friendly diesel engines. They are being offered two distinctly different ways of complying with the federal government’s 2010 cap on emissions of nitrogen oxides. In one direction is selective catalytic reduction, and in the other, more aggressive exhaust gas recirculation.
This choice is much more sharply defined than what customers — truck buyers — have been offered since 2002, when EGR was adopted by all manufacturers as the foundation for cleaning up engine exhaust through the first two rounds of the new century’s tightening restrictions.
Now come claims and counter-claims about the costs, rationalities and future possibilities of the competing technologies. That is not a bad thing in itself. Indeed, it’s the way creative and evolutionary processes often work. Huzzah for the illumination and winnowing that goes on in the competition arena.
The tone of the debate being sounded by the manufacturers, though, stands in contrast to the commonality of design that brought diesel engines to their current state in North America. The rhetoric is more pointed than before; more public jabbing is going on than the industry is accustomed to seeing displayed by its equipment makers.
We’re not sure the Louisville debate shed more light than heat. But it certainly was great theater for the patrons.
It is clear that SCR vs. EGR is a major issue for manufacturers and suppliers, but it is also a debate that the market will resolve in time. Truck buyers ultimately will decide which side of the divide, which technology path makes the most sense to them.
The market may even reward both choices, but only to the extent that either one provides the freight carrier with an efficient, hard-working, highly dependable engine — which, while it achieves everything the government requires, also gives trucking a whole new level of machine quality.
