All green Volvo
Volvo has launched the first ever CO2 free vehicle plant, the Ghents truck plant in Belgium according to this press release:
The Ghent plant decided to construct three wind power plants on the site, which will cover half of the plant’s electricity requirements. The remaining electricity consists of certified green energy supplied by the Belgium energy company, Electrabel. A new pellet-fired biomass plant supplies 70% of the heating requirements for the Ghent plant and energy for the combustion process is provided by solar cells on the roof. The remaining 30% is provided by an oil-fired boiler that was converted to burn bio oil. The Ghent plant has an annual production of 35,000 trucks. The number of employees is 2,500.
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“Our ambition is to make all our plants CO2-free plants and Ghent is the first,” says Volvo CEO Leif Johansson. “It is not an easy undertaking, but we are prepared to try different alternatives to achieve our goal for CO2-free production in our plants.”
Volvo has also engineered seven CO2 free trucks according to an article in trucksnews.com. Their engineering has evolved their engines to run on a variety of biofuels efficiently:
The bio-fuels needed to power the new family of CO2-free Volvo trucks include: biodiesel; biogas; biogas combined with biodiesel; ethanol/methanol; DME; synthetic diesel; and hydrogen gas combined with biogas.
One thing preventing them from going full scale however is the lack of a wide availability of the fuels.
“Volvo acknowledged that 14% of total global CO2 emissions are created by the transport sector with about 10% of that coming from road transport. The company said it in the process of reducing the impact its trucks have on the environment from the manufacturing process right through their operational life.“As one of the world’s largest manufacturers of heavy trucks, diesel engines and buses, the Volvo Group is part of the climate problem,” Johansson said. “But environmental issues are one of the areas which we have assigned the very highest priority, and based on our resources and knowledge, we both can and will be part of the solution.”