The Log
18 March 2025: Register now for SAE International’s annual COMVEC™, returning to Schaumburg, Illinois, on September 16-18, 2025. This industry leading event brings commercial vehicle professionals in the on-highway, off-highway and defense sectors together to collaborate in a neutral environment on what’s new in commercial vehicles—including trends, tech, evolving standards and regulations, and smart strategies. Make plans to attend!
13 March 2025: The US EPA has announced ‘historic’ actions to roll back air emissions regulations for vehicles and the energy sector. Among vehicle regulations, the EPA will reevaluate MY 2027 and later GHG emission standards for light-duty vehicles, Phase 3 GHG emission standards for heavy-duty vehicles, as well as the 2027 NOx emission standards for heavy-duty engines and vehicles [more ...]
11 March 2025: Only seven countries met the WHO air quality standards last year, according to the World Air Quality Report by Swiss air quality firm IQAir. The countries that met the WHO annual average PM2.5 guideline of 5 µg/m3 are Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Estonia, Grenada, Iceland, and New Zealand. Byrnihat, India was the most polluted metropolitan area of 2024, with an annual average PM2.5 concentration of 128.2 µg/m3. The region of Central & South Asia was home to the top seven most polluted cities in the world. India was home to six of the nine most polluted global cities. Oceania is the world’s cleanest region, with 57% of regional cities meeting the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline.
7 March 2025: Cummins announced two new medium-duty B Series engines: the B7.2 diesel engine and the B6.7 Octane gasoline engine—Cummins’ first advancement into the gasoline market. The gasoline engine, while somewhat less powerful than diesel, avoids costly DPF/SCR aftertreatment, avoids DEF, and makes 2027 emission compliance much easier [more ...]
6 March 2025: SAE International has posted an almost-final version of the program for the Heavy Duty Sustainable Transport Symposium. The conference—to be held on May 7-8 in Gothenburg, Sweden—covers global emission regulations, internal combustion engine aftertreatment (including H2-ICE), renewable fuels, and electrification topics.
26 February 2025: BP announced a “fundamentally reset strategy”, with significant capital reallocation to grow its upstream oil and gas business, while reducing investment into the transition business [more ...]
24 February 2025: ACEA has issued another call on the EU authorities to provide a penalty relief for non-compliance with the mandatory 2025 CO2 emission targets for cars and vans, as the industry is faced with a “sluggish demand” in zero-emission vehicles [more ...]
17 February 2025: Rho Motion consultancy reports that 1.3 million of electric vehicles were sold globally in January 2025. This was down over a third from December 2024 and up 18% compared to January 2024. In the US market, J.D. Power projects the growth rate of EV retail share will level off in 2025, reflecting an anticipated decline in government incentives, to reach a total of 9.1% of the total automobile marketplace, or a total of 1.2 million vehicles sold.
13 February 2025: Shell released its 2025 Energy Security Scenarios report, predicting that global demand for energy will continue to grow, while oil and gas will remain important energy sources for several decades. Shell expects that AI technologies will lead to stronger economic growth and a surge in energy demand. The global demand for LNG will continue to increase at least through 2030, fueled by growing consumption in Europe to offset the loss of Russian pipeline gas supply, as well as by rising demand in Asian economies.
7 February 2025: Global investment in the low-carbon energy sector grew 11% to hit a record $2.1 trillion in 2024, setting a new record, according to the Energy Transition Investment Trends report by BloombergNEF [more ...]
28 January 2025: Audi has launched its first combustion engines with the new MHEV plus hybridization technology [more ...]
20 January 2025: Emission standards: Updated summary of EU carbon dioxide emission performance standards for new heavy-duty vehicles.
16 January 2025: The California Air Resources Board withdrew its requests for US EPA waivers for two important emission regulations: the Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule and the In-Use Locomotive regulation [more ...]
15 January 2025: Toyota Motor subsidiary Hino Motors has reached a $1.6 billion settlement with the US Environmental Protection Agency and other US agencies over excess emissions in more than 110,000 diesel engines imported and sold in the United States from 2010 to 2022 [more ...]
27 December 2024: Updated summaries of US GHG emission and fuel economy regulations for light-duty vehicles and for heavy-duty engines and vehicles.
18 December 2024: Global coal demand is expected to grow by 1% in 2024, reaching an all-time high of 8.77 billion tonnes, according to the Coal 2024 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). This represents a considerable slowdown in growth from previous years: global coal consumption rose by 7.7% in 2021 as it rebounded from the Covid economic lockdowns, by 4.7% in 2022, and by 2.4% in 2023. The main driver of coal demand growth has been the power sector, with electricity generation from coal set to reach an all-time high of 10,700 TWh in 2024. The IEA expects the global coal consumption to level off through 2027.
17 December 2024: Updated Technology Guide paper on Compatibility of Biodiesel with Petroleum Diesel Engines—added more material on catalyst deactivation and on biodiesel effect on DOC light-off.
13 December 2024: Russia’s state oil firm Rosneft has agreed to supply nearly 500,000 barrels per day of crude oil to Indian private refiner Reliance in the biggest ever energy deal between the two countries [more ...]
Engines & Emissions | Our Credo
The internal combustion engine (ICE) has been a key prime mover that largely replaced earlier prime movers of lesser efficiency—human labor, animal work, the water wheel, the windmill, and the steam engine—thus enabling modern industrial civilization. The most efficient type of ICE, the diesel engine, has been widely used in heavy trucks, construction and agricultural machinery, rail locomotives, ships, and emergency power generation. Its gasoline counterpart has been common in passenger cars. Another related power plant, the gas turbine, has been powering commercial aviation.
For many years, engine developers have been striving to make engines cleaner. Following the three-way catalyst for gasoline engines, clean diesel technologies that enabled near-zero emissions of PM and NOx were developed and introduced in many regions of the world. The focus in technology development has then shifted to climate change and energy efficiency. The benefit of low CO2 emissions, traditionally associated with the diesel engine, is no longer sufficient to meet GHG and fuel economy regulations. New technologies are being developed—such as new combustion techniques, powertrain electrification, and waste heat recovery—that further increase the efficiency not only of the engine itself, but of the entire vehicle. Critically, as GHG emissions occur at all stages of vehicle life, from manufacture through disposal, low-carbon policies must consider life cycle effects of fuels and vehicles.
A major challenge ahead is the approaching end of the Oil Age—not only due to climate policies, but for economic reasons stemming from the depletion of easily recoverable oil resources. As fossil fuels are replaced by alternatives of lesser energetic quality, the future of mobility remains largely unknown. While the world aims to embrace more sustainable mobility, most alternative powertrain technologies depend on quantities of rare and nonrenewable natural resources, and therefore are not truly sustainable. Another often suggested approach—that of fueling the ICE by low-carbon e-fuels—suffers from low efficiency and would require substantial amounts of energy, which seems problematic in an economy that no longer has access to cheap and abundant fossil energy. All this suggests that future mobility will be based on a mix of powertrain technologies, where combustion engines continue to play an important role.