necessarily, but given the price of a
diesel engine today versus five years
ago, add in diesel fuel prices them-
selves, and given the projections for
diesel engine prices between now and
2014, apparently a lot of engine cus-
tomers are suddenly singing “give psi
a chance.”
As a result, some new packagers of
gaseous-fueled engines are appear-
ing, existing packagers are expanding
or overhauling their gas engine lines.
And some diesel manufacturers have
suddenly discovered having a gas
alternative to some of the diesel mod-
els makes a lot of business sense.
It remains to be seen if there will
indeed be a wholesale rush to natural
gas-fueled engines in the next few
years, but more than one company
has put a business plan together that
says there’s money to be made gasifying industrial engines.
3. Bricks & Mortar. Just a few
years after an economic crisis that had
many doubting the future of the overall economic system, much less the
individual companies and markets that
make up this industry and every other
one, the third element woven through
the 2011 Engine Yearbook is growth.
One new diesel manufacturer has
appeared. Kioti Engines, a division of
Korea’s Daedong, has decided there
is room for one more diesel engine
manufacturer in the 20 to 60 hp North
American market.
Elsewhere, other investments are
being made in the engine business
— here and just about every other
country or region with any kind of
OEM population. Our annual Engine
Technical Review in Diesel Progress
International reflected this as well.
Tech centers, engineering centers,
not to mention myriad test cells and
test capabilities that have and are being
added, all add up to the fact that those
that hold the purse strings — strings
that are held more tightly and watched
more closely after 2008 and 2009 —
are spending money on growing their
place in the industrial engine industry.
You are not seeing, in all this,
a great rush to brand new engine
THE YEAR IN REVIEW
A number of engine manufacturers that
had been previously reticent to get too
specific about Tier 4 final have become
anything but shy about it lately. A good
example was Cummins, which proclaimed
its Tier 4 final strategy at ConExpo, which
included the QSL9 with an integrated aftertreatment system.
plants. Capacity is not a critical problem. Component supply has caused
some headaches as things came
back more quickly than forecast, but
there are not new engine manufacturing hot-spots popping up all over.
Many plants built in the first years of
the 2000s left room to expand, “when
demand required it.” Well, apparently
demand has raised its hand, because
many, if not the majority of facilities
building diesel engines, look different
and can produce more engines than
a decade ago.
Some of this was driven by the
higher precisions and decisions that
moving from Tier 1 to Tier 4 so quickly
required of diesel manufacturers, but
it was also an impressive feat of
manufacturing engineering to take
what in some cases were pretty worn
down old engine plants and retool and
rebuild them within the existing four
walls to create today’s engine manufacturing footprint.
Again, it’s not one of those things that
is front and center in every section of
the 2011 Engine Yearbook, but it’s all
there if you look closely enough. dp
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