At Road Transport Expo 2024, we ran a conference session in partnership with the Renewable Transport Fuel Association (RTFA) detailing the decarbonisation opportunities from low carbon renewable fuels. RTFA’s Chief Executive Gaynor Hartnell took the opportunity to sit down with one of our speakers, Stewart Hymas, to understand the impact high-blend biodiesel is having on his fleet’s carbon emissions.
As a bulk tipper operator, the aim is for the 75-strong Alfred Hymas fleet of 44-tonne trucks to carry as much weight as possible.
“We move bulk products for both the agricultural and construction industries and we get paid by the tonne,” says Stewart Hymas, Managing Director of Alfred Hymas. ”We operate mainly Volvo and Renault plus a small number of Mercedes and Scania trucks. We long-life them, with some trucks staying on fleet for as long as nine years.”
The trucks are single shifted and typically do around 110,000kms a year. ”Many of our drivers will leave the yard on a Monday morning and come back on Friday night or Saturday morning. During the week the truck will be their home,” says Hymas.
When discussing decarbonisation, thoughts obviously turn to the fuelling regime of the vehicles and RTFA was keen to understand how Hymas fuels its fleet of trucks. “We’re very fortunate as we can fuel our trucks on site,” Hymas explains. “This allows us to be flexible. We have almost 140,000 litres of fuel on our site, in two large tanks, and that gives us the ability to store high blend. We currently use a B30 blend from Argent. They suggested it back in 2018, as there was a slight price advantage.”
B30 refers to the percentage of renewable biodiesel in the blend, the 30 referring to a 30% ratio, the remaining 70% being regular fossil-based diesel.
“Obviously, we were interested to reduce our carbon footprint,” Hymas continues, “but at that time we had little or no interest from our customers in that aspect. Despite this, we started using B20 in 2019 and then went on to B30.”
Switching to high-blends of renewable biodiesel does require some preparation, although as Hymas explains, the changes aren’t too onerous. “Firstly, we had to make sure our tanks were clean,” he says. “Basically, we just pumped everything out of the tanks to clean them, filtering the fuel and then starting afresh. To be fair, even though they were over 10 years old the tanks were fairly clean. We use a huge amount of fuel, so the turnover is continual.”
They also had to add some additional filtration to the yard tank supply. Both tanks have now got external canisters with 100 micron inline filters. ”We have four high speed pumps in our depot and routinely change the filters every six months.”
Other alternatives?
Low carbon biodiesel is just one option for fleets as they drive to reduce emissions and RTFA were interested to hear if the company looked at other alternative solutions, such as HVO or biomethane.
“We need to maximise the payload, so we look to save weight and chassis space wherever we possibly can,” Hymas continues. “We fit tipping hydraulics on our tractor units which limits space for things like CNG tanks. Plus, the upfront costs for buying gas trucks are much greater than diesel.”
“We looked at electric, but when we moved to our new depot we could barely get enough electricity for our own workshops, let alone recharging any trucks! In addition, roadside charging would be difficult when the drivers are out and about.”
Stewart Hymas, Managing Director
He shares that Alfred Hymas doesn’t have the same ability to recover extra costs that other businesses might. ”Our customers are not prepared to pick those costs up. Even with HVO, which would be very easy to swap to, and despite the cost of it coming down, it’s still too much for us to justify. It would wipe out any profit margin.”
We haveheard of some truck manufacturers being reluctant to offer warranties on vehicles using high blend biodiesel due to the risk of potential issues with filters and injectors clogging, but Hymas says this hasn’t been an issue. “We maintain all our own vehicles and so have complete control of the servicing. From the minute we get a truck, brand new, we don’t use any of the manufacturers’ servicing processes. We do it all in-house. Plus, we also do other fleets. We maintain as many trucks for other people as we do for ourselves, and we don’t see any difference in maintenance cost even when you look specifically at oil and filter changes [compared to regular diesel-powered vehicles].”
At low operating temperatures, there is a risk of high blend biofuels waxing, something Hymas is aware of, although working with the supplier has developed a flexible approach: “We’re not using B30 all year round,” Hymas explains, “during the winter we drop down to B20 or maybe even B10 or B15, depending how cold it is. Our supplier, Argent, manages that and so we haven’t experienced any fuel waxing problems whatsoever.”
Argent, and other RTFA members, find Zemo’s Renewable Fuel Accreditation Scheme helpful in demonstrating the savings they are achieving for their customers and Hymas sees an equally strong value in the service. “Every quarter Zemo sends us a certificate telling us how many thousand litres we’ve used and what our carbon savings have been,” he says. “We achieved 26% GHG savings, compared to using B7 in Q4 last year. That’s a big amount of saving, achieved very easily. It might not be as sexy as having a big electric truck on a picture in front of the Hymas HQ, but it’s doing the same thing.”
He concludes that this has been a very effective way to reduce carbon emissions particularly as the vehicles ”don’t need to be converted in any way at all”. ”It’s an immediate transition, it can be done straight away, dead simple. We can access all the fuel networks, so the trucks away from base can run on B7, if they need to. We don’t want to be going off route at all to refuel,” he adds.
