ripskii

Westport Innovations: A Growing Natural Gas Engine Business

MF: I wonder if you have thought about converting locomotives to NG use? Rail transport accounts for over 4 billion gallons of diesel fuel per year which is about 10% of all diesel used in the U.S (2001 data). It also emits more than 1 million tons of NOX. There are efforts to greatly reduce this, but it seems that only engine improvements on current fuels are being considered. It would appear that if heavy diesel trucks can be easily converted to NG with a huge corresponding reduction in air pollutants then diesel-electric locomotives would be amenable to a similar solution.

www.transportation.anl...

Westport Innovations: A Growing Natural Gas Engine Business

Thanks for opening the discussion on Westport. They have a solid position in the heavy duty direct injection engine market by their JV with Cummings. As others have mentioned they also have JV's with Italian and Weichai the largest Chinese heavy engine manufacturer. In addition they are working with both Kenworth and Peterbuilt for heavy duty long haul truck installations for both North America and Australia. Their engines are the heart of the Long Beach/Los Angles Port clean truck program. To the extent that NG powered heavy vehicles grow they will increase sales. San Diego transit system now uses all NG buses powered with Westport engines and Waste Management is beginning to use NG powered refuse trucks.

With the current historic 18:1 spread between oil and NG prices the economic choice to use NG as the fuel of choice is compelling, especially for fleetsof heavy vehicles.

Long WPRT.