HVO COULD BE THE NEXT BIG TRANSITION FUEL

The advantages of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), also known as renewable diesel or synthetic diesel, over petroleum diesel are well documented. HVO is a secondgeneration biofuel that can be a direct replacement (drop-in) for petroleum diesel and use the same infrastructure available for distributing, storing, and handling petroleum diesel.

Conventional diesel engines and fuel tanks do not need modifications, retrofitting or additional maintenance to use HVO either in its pure form or as a blend with petroleum diesel. Furthermore, HVO has lower sulphur content, a higher cetane number and reduces up to 90% CO2 emissions.

So, it is not surprising that equipment manufacturers worldwide are conducting pilot studies to gauge the potential of HVO in construction, mining, materials processing, and standby power applications.

Sandvik recently completed testing its mobile crushers and screeners equipped with Cat C-series engines to operate with HVO.

Mammoet demonstrated an Hvofuelled self-propelled modular transporter that was used to move two topsides weighting over 2000t.

At this year’s Swedish Rock Festival, nine gensets equipped with Volvo Penta D16 engines were powered with 100% HVO. Genset manufacturers, especially in Europe, are aligning their product range to meet the growing demand for HVO. Rolls-royce has approved its MTU Series 1600 and 4000 gensets for En15940-compliant synthetic fuels including HVO, following field tests that confirmed the performance of the engines in terms of maximum power, load acceptance and fuel consumption was the same when using HVO and diesel. Rolls-royce also found the storage stability of HVO to be significantly better than that of biodiesel, making it attractive for emergency power systems.

Kohler has approved HVO for all its diesel engines in Europe, after conducting intensive laboratory and field tests. Kohler found that despite the lower density of HVO compared to petroleum diesel, the higher cetane number compensates for the reduced power and torque performance. Cummins, too, has approved their entire line of diesel generator sets for use with HVO, in standby applications.

Following the UK government’s restrictions on the use of red diesel effective from April 2022, Aggreko announced it will stock only HVO fuel at its depots in the UK, having evaluated the fuel in its own fleet of generators, in controlled conditions.

Marr Contracting has announced it will be the first business in Australia to transition to HVO100 (100% renewable diesel) procured from Neste, the world’s largest producer of renewable diesel. Neste is also one of the key suppliers of HVO to Liebherr; HVO can now be used in the majority of the Liebherr construction machines, cranes, and mining equipment.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global HVO production is set to more than double from around 5.5 billion L in 2018 to 13 billion L in 2024. Clearly, there’s increasing demand for this fuel. However, the industry needs to tackle two major challenges, the shortage in feedstock supply and achieving manufacturing scalability, in order to get market acceptance for HVO.