$50 million in clean diesel grants up for grabs from EPA
Back in March, the EPA announced a grant of $5 million for midwest clean diesel projects. One of you called that a "token effort." Fair enough. What do you say to almost $50 million? That's the amount that the EPA announced it will spend on clean diesel research, especially on "school or transit buses, medium and heavy-duty trucks, marine engines, locomotives and nonroad engines." The EPA suggests that groups wanting a chunk of the $50m could apply for EPA-verified retrofit or idle-reduction technologies or cleaner fuel projects. The EPA doesn't specify that the $5m midwest clean diesel announcement is part of the $50m, but reading the text makes that seem likely. Still, a tenfold increase is a tenfold increase.
[Source: EPA]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rgseidl 8:57AM (4/06/2008)
EPA doesn't need to shell out much more because the new vehicle emissions rules for 2010 are anyhow forcing private industry to come up with cleaner diesels for commercial on-road vehicles. The bigrig fleet churns faster than the passenger fleet, even though bigrig engines are designed to last for 600,000 - 1,000,000 miles.
Idle reduction and alternative fuel compatibility will come about by itself purely as a result of high fuel cost.
On the other hand, publicly owned vehicles, e.g. city and school buses, tend to be in service for much longer. The average age of that fleet is probably 10-20 years. Retrofitting it makes a lot of sense in terms of population health, but many local officials don't really want to spend any money on that - there are few votes in cleaning up the air.
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A.Brien 11:36AM (4/06/2008)
This gadjet is call hydrogen insertion and is already on the market. No need to spend 50 millions
dollars.
http://www.hypowerfuel.com/product_reactor.html
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