07/22/2023 – 7:05 am
Vale is changing its strategy for the future of trucks and trains that carry its ore. The much publicized electrification of freight transport will be put in the background in the coming years, giving way to vehicles powered by renewable fuels such as ethanol, green diesel (HVO) and green ammonia, found the Estadão/Broadcast.
Despite the change, the goal of reducing carbon emissions is maintained. In scopes 1 and 2, which respectively include the operation’s transport and energy, the planned cut in emissions is 33% by 2030 and zero by 2050. This is, therefore, a change in technological route, a path towards this decarbonization to make the process more structurally and financially viable.
Electrification will not be left out, but tends to play an auxiliary role or be restricted to the transport of some mines in Brazil and around the world, in trucks with smaller loads, the director of Energy and Decarbonization, Ludmila Nascimento, told Estadão/Broadcast. Behind the change are the technological limitations of electrification and the lack of associated infrastructure in the interior of the country. Renewable fuels, in addition to greater energy efficiency, more easily reach the corners where Vale operates.
The company’s latest announcement goes along these lines. Vale ordered three more electric locomotives from Wabtec Corporation for use on the Carajás Railroad (EFC), where the largest iron ore train in the world travels, with 330 wagons and 45,000 tons of product. The electric locomotives will not replace the current diesel-powered ones, but the so-called “dynamic helper”, equipment that also consumes diesel to help on uphill stretches. In this case, the recharge also comes from the composition brake process itself.
By combining diesel and electricity, the trains assume a hybrid operation, which should precede the use of ammonia engines. “We work with different solutions at the same time, but ammonia is the biggest bet for locomotives”, said Ludimila. The development of the ammonia engine is even the subject of conversations between Vale and companies such as Wabtec itself, which is going to start laboratory studies.
The movement was explained by Vale’s technology development manager, Alexandre Alves, at an energy event organized in June by the United Kingdom consulate, in Rio de Janeiro.
“If we are certain of one thing at Vale today, it is that the solution based on electrification in batteries will not go beyond 100-tonne trucks. It is very unlikely that it will reach (trucks with) 320, 400 tons of payload (payload)”, said Alves da Silva, to an audience of executives gathered at the Museum of Tomorrow.
Vale created the PowerShift electrification program five years ago, but only started introducing electric vehicles into its fleet last year, with 72-ton trucks adapted in operations in Brazil and Indonesia. The same happened with two 100% electric switchgear locomotives, which operate on the Vitória-Minas Railroad, in Vitória (ES), and on the Carajás Railroad, in São Luís (MA). According to Alves da Silva, however, the batteries will not give higher flights in Vale’s heavy transport.
“In the beginning, we believed that electrification would solve our mobility problem in mining trucks and railways. Everything we’ve tried in that direction has gone wrong. What we understood five years ago as a silver bullet, today is nothing more than a brass bullet. We looked at it very innocently,” he continued.
At the end of the event, questioned by Estadão/Broadcast about what would be the future of Vale’s transport, the executive was straightforward: ethanol for trucks and green ammonia for trains. The use of these inputs, he recognized, requires adaptations in the engines, but they have facilities such as supply and logistics that are close to that of fossil fuels, which are unwanted.
Electrification limits
On the difficulties of the electrification process, the Vale manager cited basic aspects, such as the use of batteries for light vehicles for heavy vehicles and efficiency, as well as logistics. On that last point, he said, it would be necessary to adapt the operating logic to recharge batteries on a daily basis. And to this is added the lack of infrastructure.
“Our mines, like our railways, are poorly positioned and supplied with electricity. If we include the chargers and everything that would be necessary to replace diesel, we arrive at numbers that do not stop standing”, he said.
Alves da Silva also pointed out the suppliers’ resistance to adhering to the transition because the business of fossil fuel models has strong after-sales revenue, linked to maintenance. “Breaking away from that (combustion engine) to a standard electric platform, where the number of rotating parts drops a lot and the ‘aftersale’ will wane, brings a reaction from suppliers”.
Leader of McKinsey’s Future Mobility Center, Felipe Fava says that it is difficult to make electrification of trucks over 22 tons of load per horse possible, which can reach 40 tons in total. This is a much lower weight than Vale’s lightest vehicles.
The expert does not specifically comment on the case of the mining company, but says that the number of batteries is proportional to the weight of the load, which increases the cost of the vehicle itself and also of the operation, since it requires more charging time.
“An electric car battery weighs 500 kilos, which rises to 2 tons in a medium truck. In a heavy truck, depending on the distance and the load weight, the batteries can reach 5 tons”, he says.
As much as fast charging is used, says Fava, an electric truck of this size requires six to eight hours of charging, which makes continuous operations (24h/7 days) difficult, as is the case at Vale’s mines. “An alternative is to do ‘battery swapping’ (exchanging the battery for recharging), but replacing such a (large) battery is not so simple either”, he said.
The coordinator of the Electrical Sector Study Group at the UFRJ Institute of Economics (Gesel/UFRJ), Nivalde de Castro, says that the correlation between the number of batteries and the weight of the vehicle makes Vale’s former aspirations unfeasible. He also says that the lack of infrastructure is a fatal limitation, especially in the case of railroads, which would have to be widely electrified at a high investment cost.
Alternatives
According to Castro, one of the most promising transport decarbonization routes is that of green hydrogen. “There is a transition scenario which is to test diesel oil with a percentage of hydrogen, between 5% and 15%, which significantly reduces (carbon) emissions. In this line, ammonia, which can be considered a derivative of hydrogen, is also doing well, because it is easier to transport and store”, he says about Vale’s future solution for trains.
Regarding ethanol for heavy trucks, both experts say it is a viable option, but it depends on adaptations to the engine. “It’s feasible, but it’s a change to the original project, which implies some loss of efficiency”, says Fava. According to the Mckinsey specialist, the great advantage is due to the existing distribution infrastructure.
According to Alves da Silva, there are at least three technologies to transition from diesel to ethanol: one in which diesel remains at a certain percentage of the mixture (pilotting); another in which diesel is 100% replaced by ethanol (hot combustion); and the last one, in which diesel and ethanol enter the same engine, but separately, depending on the driver’s choice. This last option is the most quoted today at Vale, because it makes room for the use of green diesel (HVO). “Flexibility from an input point of view is always more desirable”, summarizes the manager, who was a researcher and university professor for years.
A feasible alternative, says Fava, from McKinsey, would be biogas, which would require replacing the current fleet with vehicles suitable for gas. Alves da Silva dismissed the possibility because the use of biogas would necessarily result in the emission of methane into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas considered 86 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.
“Between 2% and 5% of the methane in the gas used in engine combustion comes out through the exhaust pipe of vehicles, and this invalidates biogas as an environmentally correct option for us”, said the Vale manager.
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