ULEMCo, the hydrogen fuel pioneer, Cementation Skanska, and the world-leading building science center Building Research Establishment (BRE) are collaborating on a project to create and analyze the world’s first dual-fuel hydrogen and diesel piling machine.
It is supported by financing from Phase 1 of the Red Diesel Replacement program, which is part of the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP) under the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The ZECHER project, which stands for “Zero Carbon Hydrogen Construction Equipment for Real-world application,” will demonstrate the feasibility of converting on-site construction equipment. It will deliver the physical conversion of the rig and investigate the possibility of hydrogen fuel for decarbonizing building sites.
The testing is being conducted on a Soilmec SR30 rotary and CFA piling rig at the state-of-the-art manufacturing and fabrication facility of Cementation Skanska in Bentley Works, South Yorkshire. The construction rig with the Cummins QSB6.7 engine is a medium-sized rig. These machines may normally consume 100 liters of diesel each day, resulting in 262 kg of CO2 emissions. Decarbonizing these machines will help the building industry reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The use of hydrogen to decrease or eliminate emissions in the construction industry is not as well-developed as its usage in the transportation industry. The test will be conducted on a piling rig, but ZECHER will use the results to investigate the viability of using hydrogen to reduce carbon emissions and significantly enhance air quality for a variety of heavy-duty, non-road equipment typically used in the early stages of large infrastructure construction projects.
The research will analyze the variety of equipment used on a building site, provide extensive energy use and duty cycle data, and investigate the requirements and possibilities for tackling the issues associated with providing hydrogen on a national scale. Given the enormous quantities required, conversion to hydrogen dual-fuel will allow green hydrogen costs to fall below those of white diesel if the constraints of fulfilling the energy density problem of on-machine storage are overcome.
“ZECHER plans to show that conversion to dual-fuel will save up to 50% CO2 in this duty cycle, and we expect that it will provide additional emissions benefits such as reduction in NOx and particulates”, said Amanda Lyne, Managing Director of ULEMCo. “The machines used in construction are owned and used for many years, so demonstrating a decarbonisation solution that utilises these existing assets is not only cost-effective but also important for sustainability.”
“We are exploring a range of innovations that will support us in decarbonising our operations, with a target of achieving net zero carbon by 2045,” said Terry Muckian, Managing Director, Cementation Skanska. “Replacing diesel is key to achieving this target. We need solutions that will offer operational certainty and reliability, that will also set us on the pathway to full decarbonisation. We have already done this with HVO (hydro-treated vegetable oil), with all our plant fleet including piling rigs running on this fuel since the beginning of 2022. Exploring the role that hydrogen could play in our future operation is of strategic importance to us.”
“The UK construction sector uses around 1bn litres of fuel annually, generating about 2.7m tonnes of CO2, and therefore finding ways to decarbonise the sector is critical to delivering the UK’s targets for net zero”, said Ranjit Bassi of BRE. “BRE’s role in the project is to look across the sector and to help accelerate the transition to clean fuels. Hydrogen looks to be one of the only currently viable routes to doing this in the available timescale.”
