At the Volvo Truck Sustainability Summit held in Brisbane during May, Per-Erik Lindström, Senior Vice President at Volvo Trucks International, shared insights into the different technologies and solutions that will allow Volvo Trucks to achieve a target of 100% fossil fuel free vehicles by 2040.
“If you start with a combustion engine; yes, the combustion engine will continue to be be a solution, but we will have renewable fuels,” shared Lindström. “Battery electric will be a very important part of this transformation. But then we also have the fuel cell electric.”
Over the next two decades, Volvo Trucks forecast a combination of battery electric, fuel cell electric and renewable fuel internal combustion engines forming part of their lineup depending on the application and market conditions.
Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil or HVO, is emerging as an interim alternative to diesel that will allow customers to reduce their emissions while continuing to use internal combustion energy technology.
At the 2023 Brisbane Truck Show, every truck from the Volvo Group on display was filled with HVO to demonstrate that it can be a viable alternative today without massive investments or changes to customer operations.
“The combustion engine has served us very, very well for roughly 100 years,” states Lindström. “I would say that Volvo has been the pioneers developing the combustion engine over the years. We were among the first to have turbo charged engines back in the late 50s. And from there we’ve continue to develop them. Today, the internal combustion engines have roughly 50% thermal efficiency. So it’s a very good and robust technology. But we foresee solutions for renewables like HVO.”
“We also see different kind of gas solutions like liquified natural gas and liquified biogas as a sustainable solution. And we also see that hydrogen is a possibility for an internal combustion engine. It’s roughly the same technology as using an LNG or LPG. We’re using the diesel process with no spark plugs. And already today in Europe we have a quite big fleet of LNG and LPG trucks on the road and they work very well.”
