David is the CEO at Westport Fuel Systems. He comes from NYC has always lived a life revolving around cars. It’s his passion. After engineering school, he joined Ford, and even went to develop power trains for that company, and also for GM before joining Westport Fuel Systems.
He recalls this quote as a lesson from his steps in the automotive industry:
“To be succesful in product development, the solutions need to be affordable”.
David thinks that transportation solutions stand on a three-legged stool, including customer satisfaction, environment, and affordability.
The lightbulb moment for David was a long time ago in his dad’s shop while filling propane tanks for RVs, BBQ grills when suddenly a car arrived to be refueled and that sparked his mind. Threaded to his whole life is this view of gaseous fuel vehicles as something that has a significant place in the market.
David has been the CEO of WFS since January 2019, and their many brands include companies like T.A. which serves Latin-America mainly, but also other parts of the world. One thing those brands have in common is that all of those brands were started by an entrepreneur. This happened with Zavoli, OMVL, BRC, and TA. All of them have a rich story of how to satisfy customers with cleaner and affordable solutions.
Since 2016 Westport Innovations (the innovation company from BC Canada) was merged with Fuel Systems Solutions and each of those companies had a great portfolio with amazing brands, with good geographical distribution, manufacturing capabilities, innovation and a great combination of attributes, all focused on delivering gaseous fuel systems, with conversion kits, OEM alliances, engine technologies and almost every aspect of the industry.
LPG and LNG are an important part of the company, and David believes that every fuel will have its place in the future. Today, about 100 million cars and trucks are produced every year; this means a big deal of development and opportunity,
According to David:
It’s not possible that only one fuel is going to be the answer for all cars and trucks.
He thinks that for the vast majority of transportation users, vehicles are one of the most expensive things that they could ever buy, and that’s considering that most vehicles aren’t even luxury vehicles. The needs around the world are very clear, and they must include of course affordability, David says.
LNG and the hypes of new fuels
Hypes and Realities often have time gaps between them, it has happened with Hydrogen, with electric vehicles, but according to David with regard to LNG, he thinks that LNG is actually happening now.
For instance, David tells us that in Europe IVECO got us started, they lead with LNG vehicles about a decade ago, and sold very modest quantities, but stuck with it, and continued to offer it. So they’ve had products on offer with spark-ignited engines running on LNG for commercial vehicles for a decade now. We now have more than one product, all with an excess of 400 horsepower. And these are products that really meet the demands of customers in the fleet market for commercial vehicles. And so they’re real products, they’re not experiments, they’re not demonstrations, they’re affordable, they’re effective, and they deliver for their customers.
Now, in the current times, other manufacturers like Scania and Volvo are offering LNG solutions, and not only that, LNG stations infrastructure is building out. Now it’s doubled in the last 2 years. Around 330 LNG stations are spread
What Westport’s HPDI engine brings to the table
Westport’s High-Pressure Direct-Injection Technology (HPDI) engine that they put into production in 2018, offers the full torque curve like a diesel engine, so there’s really no takeaway in performance. And also they offer the full efficiency of a diesel engine. Again, no takeaway. No degradation of the performance of the product. And so that combination allows them to grab a hold of and deliver the full economic benefit of a cheaper fuel as LNG, and the fuel for carbon reduction potential of methane (20% reduction) even with the use of fossil methane. Then, in addition, the advent of biomethane, which in the US is growing rather dramatically. Consider that about 40% of natural gas used in transportation is biomethane, and in Europe, it’s approaching 20%. This additional environmental benefit in a cost-effective way is very remarkable.
But what exactly is the HPDI engine?
It’s the product they’re the proudest of, because of what it offers in the marketplace. High-pressure direct-injection means essentially, to replace in a diesel engine the diesel fuel injector with their fuel injector, the HPDI injector. And this HPDI injector enables to run the diesel engine, just like a diesel engine but using primarily natural gas, so at each stroke of the piston in the combustion cylinder, when it gets to the top dead center, it injects a small pilot injection of diesel to initiate combustion. And that is followed by the main injection of natural gas.
And so you get this ratio of about 95% natural gas to 5% diesel, and you get the dramatic, clean benefits of natural gas, as well as all the efficiency benefits of running a diesel engine, like high compression ratio, and others. So basically, that difference between a gasoline engine and a diesel engine, it’s preserved with HPDI. Whereas a spark-ignited natural gas engine, is running more like a gasoline engine. So you fail to achieve the torque and efficiency that a diesel engine has.
This is the fundamental that Westport can achieve, this very high diesel substitution rate on the order of 95%.
This across all the operating range, and really have all the benefits of natural gas, but yet keeping all the benefits of a compression ignition engine. This technology was developed in the early 90s at the University of British Columbia. And this was the founding technology upon which Westport innovations got started in 1995. So the development is a long development.
There are over 1400 patents on the technology.
Westport launched it initially with what they call the HPDI 1.0. But it wasn’t really commercially ready at that point in time. So they developed their next generation, which is now called HPDI 2.0, which really brought it to a state of industrialization and commercialization suitable for long haul trucks. David is very proud with respect to the reliability, durability, performance, noise, and all the key attributes delivered by HPDI that are now validated and really getting great reviews from the marketplace.
See all the specs on the HPDI 2.0 engine
The complexity of bringing an engine to the market
The business of delivering engines to the marketplace that meet emissions and other customer requirements is a very sophisticated one, very challenging with regard to technical development. And so in the case of HPDI, Westport is working directly with leading manufacturers of engines and vehicles, to integrate their fuel system with their engine.
It is a constant and ongoing activity of collaboration between Westport and its customer partners.
About bringing the HPDI engine to China
After the European successes from 2018, Westport is bringing HPDI to the Chinese market. They recently announced the certification of that engine. Following the certification of the engine, we will have the certification of vehicles.
So the Weichai-Westport joint venture will sell engines to leading truck manufacturers but in China. It’s a fact that they’re working with multiple Chinese truck manufacturers to get those certifications completed, as well as the necessary approvals from the Chinese Ministry such that trucks and engines can start to be sold, and produced into now the largest market in the world for natural gas commercial vehicles.
The entire Chinese trucking market is in the order of a million trucks per year, just by itself. It’s a place now where natural gas and trucking is already 10% of the annual sales of new trucks. So this is a really important threshold of note really being a key ingredient of what is offered for sale. And that’s all today on the basis of spark-ignited natural gas engines. So it’s a really important development for Westport. China is a place that has had a long and focused effort to bring natural gas to trucking, and therefore, is now the largest market in the world, and when the Westport products come to market, offering the full torque and the full efficiency of the diesel engine, as opposed to the lesser performance of a spark in natural gas engines, they expect to accelerate the growth of natural gas trucking in China as well as being a big success.
The missing ingredient for NGVs in the Americas
For David, what’s missing in the United States and the Americas, in general, is the stability and predictability of the fuel price advantage of LNG versus diesel or CNG versus petrol. He thinks that we have it sometimes, and sometimes it’s meaningful. But other times it dips to almost nothing, sometimes it can even be negative. And in that situation, it’s very difficult for OEMs and fuel providers and everybody else to make long-range plans.
What companies like Westport do in our industry takes a long time. It’s not a mobile phone app, that can’t just be developed, and put on the market to let the customers debug it. These are cars and trucks, and they have long lives. They provide important functions to their owners, and therefore it takes significant investments to bring to market. Actual plants and machine parts need to be built. So from that perspective, a marketplace is needed, a marketplace where there can be a return on investments that also help respond to the environmental challenges that we face.
Westport and the Hydrogen Economy
The recent developments on Hydrogen as vehicle fuel are quite exciting. Westport sees that as an opportunity in commercial vehicles. David comments that there’s a growing number of jurisdictions in the United States, Japan, China, and Europe, that are all eager to get to a hydrogen-based economy for transportation.
So what they see at Westport Fuel Systems is that first of all, they’re already in the hydrogen business because they already make the components that deliver hydrogen from the tank to fuel cells. So they see themselves as a leader in that technology, by developing and providing these components for quite some time, working with all the major companies around the world that are preparing next-generation technologies for transportation based on hydrogen.
Also, they see an opportunity for hydrogen to leverage their existing HPDI technology. They’ve done some initial work, by modeling and showing that with hydrogen, and the HPDI in an internal combustion engine, they can have some very compelling results with respect to performance and efficiency. They’re going into the next phase of development, where they’ll be running engines using hydrogen and the HPDI equipment. Those results are very much awaited in the marketplace with the chance that that could be another very interesting and economical way to use hydrogen for transportation and achieve this zero-carbon transportation system.
Final Insights around the world for natural gas vehicles
It’s very interesting how different markets for natural gas vehicles around the world are developing and what they’re targeting. Not everybody follows the same playbook.
For David, Egypt is a really good example, where basically, they see themselves as having natural gas in their market as their own fuel sources. In a “let’s use what we have” kind of approach. And that’s why president Abdelfatah El-Sisi has made this declaration where the market there will move to natural gas-powered vehicles almost exclusively. That’s a path that countries can follow and Westport is very excited to support it
Other countries like Argentina have been in natural gas for basically all time and so they’ve worked to develop a natural gas refueling system. Now 10% of the vehicles in that market are already today operating on natural gas.
Another example, a country like Turkey has plenty of LPG and propane, so there has been a significant investment in having propane-fueled vehicles.
Each market around the world is saying: “This is what we have, what can we do?, How can we be self-sufficient?”, and then making plans accordingly.
India is another country taking a very strategic approach to the future of transportation and transportation fuels and is making a big plan around natural gas. Today they’re building rather rapidly, they have planned to have 10,000 natural gas stations very soon. The Prime Minister has made this a signature initiative of his to build out the infrastructure to support natural gas vehicles. Meanwhile, in April of this year, right in the middle of our COVID crisis around the world, India changed its emission standards from Euro IV to Euro VI six. And this change to a very clean emission standard, which of course, it’s good for all people to clean the air and have a better environment to live in, comes with significant costs for diesel engines.
What the future has in store for diesel and natural gas vehicles
David comments that they’ve seen manufacturers absolutely dropping diesel engines from their portfolio and saying, “We just don’t offer them anymore”. They’re not cost-competitive. And each one of those manufacturers is then investing more in bringing natural gas vehicles to the market because they see that these meet the customer’s demands, and are affordable, the technologies available today, and the refueling infrastructure is being built out.
So David expects this decade to be really a very, very important decade in many markets. India and Egypt are two good examples, but certainly not the only ones. The growth potential for natural gas and markets around the world is really quite astounding.
Just like David, I really believe that this is the decade we will see the significant growth in the ground, what’s being sold, what’s being used, and how are we cleaning the air in an affordable way.