JCB’s road to alternative fuel has led the company to develop a hydrogen-powered engine that it says is capable of zero emissions while providing the power to meet the needs of the construction and agricultural industries.
Equipment World sat down with Tim Burnhope, chief innovation and growth officer for JCB, who detailed the company’s journey to the hydrogen-powered engine and its potential impact on the marketplace.
EQUIPMENT WORLD: Can you provide us some background on JCB’s move toward hydrogen power?
Burnhope: At JCB, we are passionate about offering a zero emissions solution for the industry. Our chairman, Lord Bamford, challenged our development team to provide a power solution to the industry that is affordable and can be easily adopted. We started by looking at battery electric product, and we have seven fantastic products already out in the field. But these products tend to work in urban environments. When we take them out of the city, we can end up potentially charging them with existing diesel generators. We needed a technology that was more mobile. And our customers like the freedom to be able to use the machines for as many hours as they need to suit the job that is applicable. So we started to look at different fuels.
During our research, we kept narrowing it down to hydrogen. At the time, the only solution at the time was the hydrogen fuel cell. We built a fuel cell excavator, and it was a great machine. But we concluded that it was just too expensive and too complicated for the markets we serve. Fuel cells are very expensive; the technology is still immature, and the supply chain is still small. And the technology is difficult to service in the environments where our equipment works.
The other concern had to do with the market. Our industry is based on the ability to sell machines for a second and third life. Residual values for construction equipment especially tends to be very good. People seem to be very nervous to try and sell fuel cell products, or even some battery products, to second or third life without the fuel cell being replaced, or without the batteries being replaced.
We needed something that operated in much the same way as diesel engines work today. So we thought, "Why can’t we put hydrogen into a into a combustion engine and make it work?" That challenged us to create the hydrogen fuel engine. An engine that takes hydrogen as its fuel and operates in much the same way as a diesel engine, with the benefits of zero emissions.
