Jim Park Unveils the Future of Trucking: Alternative Fuels and Beyond

Join us for an exclusive interview as renowned industry expert Jim Park delves into the captivating world of trucking's future. In this insightful video, Jim Park shares his invaluable insights on the revolutionary potential of alternative fuels in shaping the trucking landscape. Prepare to be amazed as he unravels the latest advancements and cutting-edge technologies that are paving the way for a greener and more sustainable industry. From electric trucks to hydrogen-powered engines, Jim explores the exciting possibilities and challenges that lie ahead. Gain a deeper understanding of the economic, environmental, and operational implications of embracing alternative fuels in trucking. This thought-provoking discussion will leave you inspired and eager to be part of the transformation. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to stay tuned for more captivating conversations and expert analysis from Jim Park, your trusted source for all things trucking and alternative fuels!

You can reach out to Jim j.park@sympatico.ca


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Transcript

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 0:23

Welcome to the Trucking Risk and Insurance Podcast. We're your host, John Farquhar of Summit Risk Solutions and myself, Christopher Charles Harris. Uh, get the opportunity to talk to a great many people, uh, that know a few things a lot more than what John and I know, and this week is no different. Mr. Jim Park, an independent journalist, uh, joins us this week and he was recently at the. Advanced Clean Truck Expo in Anaheim, California, and Jim's gonna talk to us about what is coming down the highway at us in the way of technology. Mr. Park. Jim, how are you today? Yeah. How are you

Jim Park, Journalist: 1:10

doing the world, Chris? Doing great. How

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 1:12

about you? I couldn't be better. I've been busy. I've been working. The weather has turned around. It looks like, like I might actually smoke a cigar today.

Jim Park, Journalist: 1:24

Don't do that. You'll wreck the environment. The activist chasing you with a fire hose, don't do it. I'm warning you,

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 1:31

you're probably right, but we're not here talking about activists today. We're here talking about trucking technology and what the heck is coming down the pipe because you and your experience, you get exposed to a lot of technology. What is coming down the pipe? Jim?

Jim Park, Journalist: 1:48

Man, you name it, it's coming our way. I was, uh, down at the Advanced Clean Truck Expo in Anaheim, California last week. Oh, four days on the ground. Everything imaginable under the sun to do with decarbonizing trucking was there. Mm-hmm. Battery trucks, hydrogen trucks, natural gas trucks, chargers, you name it. Um, technology is mind boggling on the, on the decarbonizing side, you know, on the, on the safety side, you know, we've got all new, all these advanced driver assistant systems, they call them, adas, emergency braking cameras. really amazing what's going on, on the safety front as well. And yet we still have, you know, fairly low level of enthusiasm amongst drivers for some of that technology. some of it's understandable, you know, the surveillance culture, et cetera, et cetera. But, they're, they're working on ways to mitigate some of those driver concerns, I think. But, you know, we can talk a bit about that as we go along here. It's just really, you know, ever since. big Tech, Silicon Valley decided that trucking was a market that needed some disruption. we've been disrupted and, and it's gonna continue happening for a while. I'm, I'm not, I. Bought into all of it yet. Uh, I think some of it's kind of superfluous and maybe kind of whizzbang and nice to have if you wanna impress your girlfriend. But I'm not too sure how much of it's gonna have a, a, a really long and lasting impact on truck safety. But we'll see. I've been wrong before.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 3:14

Well, before we get I think truck safety, I didn't know you were at the show. so we'll get into truck safety, but before we get into that, let's talk about the environment and everything. What is decarbonization, what's your definition of that?

Jim Park, Journalist: 3:29

Stay home. Cuz the batteries won't take you far enough. No, I mean, it's, it's the buzzword now. Uh, everybody's trying to, uh, do whatever they can to eliminate trucking or reduce carbon trucking's carbon footprint. So decarbonization, that's the buzzword. it's working in, in very small degrees at the moment. You know, we've got some penetration of battery, electric, light trucks, delivery trucks, parking, uh, package vans and what have you. They're making their way onto market. Now, you can actually go out and buy one, like put your money down and drive it home. you may not get it outta the parking lot again because there's no charging infrastructure, but that's another story. We're working on that too. then on the heavy side, well, not so much. We've got all the major oes now and a few others are producing Class eight battery electric tractors, limited range so far in the 150 to 200 mile range, which in some applications is fine. Nobody's arguing that with that. But trying to push over to the long haul side. it's gonna be a real challenge because we don't have the range in the batteries, of course. Mm-hmm. And we don't really have a suitable replacement for diesel yet.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 4:39

Because the reason Jim Range is such a big thing in electric vehicles. I mean, I drive an electric, so I'm conscious of range all the time and charging infrastructure. So you hit a couple of points there. That range isn't there yet, nor is the infrastructure. What does the future look like for both of those? If you want to tackle them one at a time, maybe,

Jim Park, Journalist: 5:06

uh, well, let's start with the infrastructure first. It's the critical element right now. Um, It's, it's a mess, frankly. The, uh, nobody's really sure. And, and it depends who you talk to. I'm, uh, I don't really have a position on this because I'm not smart enough to be able to figure it out, the advocates insist that we've got the capacity in the grid to do this. I'm not sure that's the case, and I've heard a lot of people saying, uh, the grid's already stretched the capacity and, you know, at certain times of the day in certain locations. And typically when we say that we're talking about California. So let's just be clear if you're in Kansas or, or New Hampshire, probably not as big a deal as it is in California, but frankly, you know, the push to decarbonize, electrify trucking hasn't pushed its way far enough east yet. For those jurisdictions to be sort of taking notice of the problem. So we talk about Texas, we talk about California, both having stressed grids. We saw what happened in Texas a couple years ago with that ice storm. Mm-hmm. Shut everything down. Now it's many years away, but just imagine that your entire transportation infrastructure is electric now. Mm-hmm. So you have no, no trucks going to grocery stores. You have no trucks, no ambulances, no buses, no anything with more than four wheels, uh, running around doing what they normally do. Uh, utility companies going out after a thunderstorm or a hail storm to fix the power lines and utility lines that have all fallen down. Well, if they're not diesel, then. They're pooched, They're fix a problem and they're grounded by that same problem. So, I mean, I, I really am talking a long time in the future before the concentration of electric vehicles gets to that stage, but it is,

John Farquhar, Summit Risk Solutions: 6:55

oh, I was gonna say, you, you, you've even got, you know, harsh weather events, you know, in the south, southeast hurricane season when it comes up, you know? Sure. Pulling across Florida and the south. Uh, and then the northeast, we've seen this, unfortunately before Northeast and even Southwestern Ontario in particular, is when we get those really hot, hot, humid time periods. And everybody, you know, the, the, the utilities are screeching at us. You know, don't be turning on your, uh, air conditioners. You're overpowering the grid. Well, what's gonna happen when we got transportation? Sucking a lot of that outta the infrastructure right away. You know, uh, and that was sudden we have a blackout like we did back in, oh God, when was that? 2003, 2004. Um, which caused a big shutdown.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 7:41

Yep. Yeah. And just to be clear though, Jim, just for anybody listening, as they said, I drive an electric car, um, I don't think electric cars are gonna have the same impact because I charge at night when most of the power is readily available. That wouldn't be the same though for transportation. Mm-hmm. They need to charge when they're empty. They don't have the luxury of kind of scheduling their charge.

Jim Park, Journalist: 8:07

that's part of the, part of the equation really, is when you charge, it's not so much how much you use, which obviously is a concern, but if, like you said, everybody's drawing it off, you know, nine to five, Monday to Friday, then we're in big trouble. But if you look at the. Delivery infrastructure. You, you know, all the package vans and what have you, they tend to run Monday to Friday, nine to five. So they have to charge overnight when typically the grid is less stressed. And you also have, untapped renewables. I'm speaking mostly about hydroelectric here. Uh, all night long, water keeps going over the dam and there's really nothing to do with that energy. So they turn off the turbines and let it go. If that could be harnessed, they say, you know, that would add a lot of additional electric capacity to the grid. And the nice thing with batteries is you don't have to use it as you produce it. Like you turn on your kettle or your toaster. your car, as you know, sits in your driveway overnight charges at two in the morning when everybody else is asleep. Get up in the morning and away you go. Well, it's more or less the same for trucking and transportation. There's also really, nobody knows for sure how this is gonna work out, but very few people are, are expecting these trucks to go right down to zero. They'll be mm-hmm. Coming back to the yard with 20% charge still on them. 80%. 60% depending on the roots they put the trucks on. So every day is not going to be a matter of 100% capacity drawn off the grid for every truck that's out there. Mm-hmm. It could be as low as half of what you know, the battery capacity actually is. Sun doesn't shine obviously during the night, but the wind continues to blow. So you've got some renewable energy, they're from windmills, um, and you've got. Uh, you know, untapped resources in hydroelectric and even nuclear when they throttle those plants down, the natural gas plants all tend to throttle down at night. So if all that could be ramped up, actually they say it's good for the grid. If it runs at higher capacity all the time, it's more efficient, than turning it up and down. So if you figure, you add, you know, a few thousand trucks to a, to a power distribution, that let, it's gonna demand a lot of output from the utility. And they'd probably be happy knowing that all that draw is there because they can run their systems at a higher level, at a more efficient level. So technically that's a good thing. I

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 10:35

really believe that the first part of trucking to go electric will be the, the last mile delivery segment. You know, the Amazon or the. The internet shopper delivery package thing, which is growing like crazy at the moment, as we all know. Um, I think that'll be the first mm-hmm. Part to get it electric because as you say, they're delivering during the day and then they're gonna be charging at night and the range isn't huge. we're seeing some of that now is actually quite small. Yeah. Yeah.

John Farquhar, Summit Risk Solutions: 11:07

Well, I was gonna say, uh, a good, a good study that we're seeing right now, PepsiCo, uh, uh, with the FritoLay and, uh, and Pepsi, uh, they've already taken delivery of some Tesla vehicles out in the California region, and, and they've got a limited range, but they're working with that range for the purposes of what they're doing, and it seems to be so far successful.

Jim Park, Journalist: 11:27

Yeah. If, if what the, the fleets and the OEMs have been able to do, thanks to telematics basically is track those vehicles to within inches, you know? Mm-hmm. And, and milliwatts on a trip. when they say, you know, what's the range of this truck? 150 miles? the variables there are enormous, you know, weight, weather conditions, ambient temperature, and, and even the way the driver operates, the truck, uh, opportunities for regenerative braking, for example, to charge top up the charge in the battery, so to say 150 miles is, is, is not really a good way of looking at this. And every truck is gonna be different. So once the fleets understand the use profile on that truck, they can say, okay, I've got a, a 78 mile route and I'll run that, you know, Monday through Thursday, and then on Friday I want to go 150 miles. Well, obviously that truck's gonna probably not make the 150 mile trip, but why would you put that truck on 150 mile trip if you were pretty sure it wasn't gonna make it? Mm-hmm. Send the diesel out. Yeah. Or relay it somehow. Work out a charging arrangement with your customer at the other end. Mm-hmm. Uh, but for the applications where the fleets understand the, the operating profile and the opportunities for charging that exist on the way and over time with trials and, you know, examining the profiles of various routes that the drivers have actually run, they know exactly, I mean, to the, what, how many kilowatts it's gonna take to get the truck from the yard out to the delivery point, make two or three stops and back to the yard at night and still have 40% charge left on board. So range in that respect is not a concern at all. They understand that it's when they try and push the envelope and go further than the trucks are really intended to go. But getting back to what we talked about earlier, where are we gonna put these trucks? Well, the obvious case is put them well out where they work, put them where the ranges are compatible, the duty cycles are compatible, and drivers have some opportunity for, uh, for charging on route various customers. Now, I was talking to the folks at Schneider, uh, down at a c t in California, and they're actively working with some of their larger customers to install charging facilities on the customer side. So the Schneider truck drives in, backs into the door driver hooks up the cable, they're 45 minutes, two hours, whatever, loading, unloading the truck is charging all that time. So presumably it'll pick up, I'm gonna pick a number, 50%, 60% of it's charge in a couple of hours. Mm-hmm. It's the last 20% that's the hardest to charge. Yeah. So if we keep things below 80, uh, the charging's actually relatively quick. So there you've got a good case where now the truck can go, let's say, 200 miles to a customer, charge for two hours while it's loading and unloading and come back, charge up again. Go back. It's, it becomes a lot more practical. Mm-hmm. But to simply say, I'm gonna get up in the morning, my truck will be fully charged at a hundred percent and I'm gonna drive for 250 miles and then it puked. nobody's gonna accept that.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 14:48

Yeah. Yeah. Well, as I say, I, I drive an electric and it causes you to change your plans, especially on those, um, longer trips, you have to plan differently. Mm-hmm. Um, I enjoy it, but I also accept it. For some drivers. It's not ready for long haul yet. But let me ask this. We've been talking about electric. It's not ready for the long haul. It's not ready for Chicago to California yet, but are there other technologies out there, such as hydrogen is one that comes to my mind that might be ready, or, or is the future of the newer trucks going to be electric? What do you think?

Jim Park, Journalist: 15:32

Well, there's, there's room in the market for everybody. at this stage of the game, we still don't, you know, have lithium, di lithium crystals, uh, or flux capacitors. So we have to rely on more traditional technologies. hydrogen, you know, I'm, I did an interview with a guy, uh, Cambridge University. Professor, who's got a long and storied career in trucking, examining trucking issues. He's not unfamiliar with what we're up against here. And he laid out for me some pretty damning statistics on hydrogen, uh, why it won't work. it was a really good interview. I thought, it opened my eyes. I don't wanna rain on Hydrogen's Parade here, but people say, and have been saying for years, hydrogen is the fuel of the future and it always will be. because practical applications for it, yeah, they exist. But the, the problem with hydrogen, it's the most abundant element in the universe. Period. But it's, it, it never in under any circumstances exists in its pure form. Naturally you have to extract it from something. So water, uh, some hydrocarbon like methane or natural gas. And in the conversion process, so much of the energy, the original energy is lost to create the hydrogen. Uh, it, it almost makes it well as this professor David Saban is his name from Cambridge. He laid it out that if you start with a hundred kilowatts of energy and you electrolyze water, when that process is finished, you've only got 70% of the energy content or less left from what you started with. So from a hundred, now you're down to 70. You've got this unit of hydrogen that's. Whatever you manage to produce for a hundred kilowatts, but there's only actually 70 kilowatts worth of energy in this little bit of hydrogen. So then you take that hydrogen and you transport it and compress or compress it first, then transport it. There's more losses in there. And then when you get to the fuel cell where you're converting the fuel, the hydrogen back to electricity, sort of the reverse of electrolysis, uh, it's only 50% efficient. Huh? That process. So now you've taken a hundred percent to 70%, you've got 70, you've got say another five to 10% for the compression and transmission. Now you're down to the fuel cell. So you've got 50% of 60% of what you started with. Mm-hmm. Now you're down to 30% of the energy that you started with wheels. You lose another four or 5% in the motors and the transmissions and everything. So, okay. There's inefficiencies there. Big inefficiencies. Mm-hmm. But somebody has to pay for that. Mm-hmm. It has to produce this volume of hydrogen. You have to pay for a hundred kilowatts worth of energy. Yeah. From the grid. Right. Or you have to build out enough capacity that you can produce three to four times as much energy to produce an equivalent volume of hydrogen than if you had batteries or diesel or natural gas. So all that to say, it's in a lot of ways horribly inefficient in terms of the, the energy that's lost in the process that doesn't actually make it to the wheels. So currently then there's the issue. Maybe I am burying hydrogen here. The other issue is how do you this stuff. Electrolysis is the obvious answer. It's green, right? That's what everybody wants. So you have water flowing over dams all night long. You plug in an electrolyzer and poof you get hydrogen. That, that's great, but we have no electrolysis capacity to speak of in North America at the moment. It's being built out, but eh, years, you know, five to 10 years before it becomes commercially viable. The way hydrogen's produced, and this is amazing, the way hydrogen's produced now for industrial purposes is called steam methane reformation. Complicated process, but they make it with natural gas and methane and they, they superheat water to a thousand degrees to get this steam. They get this thousand degrees steam and they mix it in with methane gas. Somehow the chemical engineer guys could tell you all about this, but it splits the methane into carbon dioxide and hydrogen. C H four, that's a hydrocarbon molecule. So you get all this other stuff that you don't want. Right. The, the, the methane from the hydrocarbons mm-hmm. That you're using. Uh, according to Saban, you get one kilogram of hydrogen, or to get one kilogram of hydrogen, you also get nine kilograms of co2. Oh. Which is the stuff we're trying to get rid of, right? Yeah, exactly.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 20:40

Exactly.

Jim Park, Journalist: 20:41

How, this is the amazing part. This is the amazing part. Saban says, a kilogram of hydrogen contains the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. Hmm. When you burn a gallon of gasoline, you get 9.8 kilograms of co2. Mm-hmm. It's taken you nine kilograms or you've produced nine kilograms of CO2 to produce that one kilogram of hydrogen. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Unless I'm doing the math wrong, it's the same. Mm-hmm. You burn hydrogen. Yes. At a much lower efficiency. You produce all this co2, it's the same as a gallon of gas or basically a gallon of diesel. How, how is that achieving decarbonizing trucking? Yeah,

John Farquhar, Summit Risk Solutions: 21:35

definitely not efficient.

Jim Park, Journalist: 21:37

And, and if you don't believe me, you know, go online, Google, David Saban hydrogen and you'll read all kinds of stuff that he is written, all kinds of papers he's done on this. I no reason to doubt he's wrong. Uh, and the hydrogen people are pretty quick to downplay what he's saying. I mean, the train's left the station. There's too many people on board now with hydrogen to, to let any of those details slow anybody down. Mm-hmm. But hydrogen's gonna remain, even the price of a hydrogen truck for heaven takes, five, $600,000 mm-hmm. Compared to a battery electric truck at maybe three to 400,000.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 22:16

Mm-hmm. Okay?

Jim Park, Journalist: 22:17

Mm-hmm. So, and with a hydrogen truck, it's essentially an electric truck, right? You've got a battery, you've got motors, you've got wheels, but you've also got the fuel cell, which you don't have on a battery electric truck. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 22:28

Well, that's one of the things I wanted. So

Jim Park, Journalist: 22:30

that adds a walk to the cost plus the tanks and everything else. Yep. It doesn't come for free. And I should say here, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm shoveling madly on hydrogen. But the battery side of this is equally nasty when you get into the, the CO2 emissions and the mining problems and the, you know, tearing up sensitive environmental areas. Mm-hmm. Uh, human labor to extract, uh, the mine from these poor countries that, you know, will do anything for a dollar practically because they're in such economic straits, uh, lithium mining company knocks on their door and yeah. Do whatever you want and we'll throw how many of these poor people at the mining project and get everything going. It's an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen unless it's done Right. Indonesia and places in Africa, they don't do things right because nobody really holds their feet to the fire. Mm-hmm. In Canada, we're talking about doing a lot of mining up north. I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt here and say they'll probably do it right. But it'll be too expensive on the world market. Mm-hmm. Nobody will buy this stuff if they can still buy it from China and Indonesia and other places that produce it for much, much less. So either way you look at it, you know, we've got humans have a, a big, messy, dirty footprint. Mm-hmm. You know, we leave it behind wherever we go. So whether it's diesel or gasoline or natural gas or hydrogen or batteries, there's no fri free ride here, folks. There is no mm-hmm. Clean transportation. Mm-hmm. You pay for it one way or the other. And it's another fallacy to believe otherwise. And I, these people that talk about zero emissions trucking make me crazy. Zero emissions at the truck. Yes. Tail pipe. There isn't a tailpipe. Right. But the upstream emissions on some of this stuff, man, it is mind boggling.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 24:29

Yeah. Sorry, that's, we can get into Well no, but things like, uh, recycling the batteries is one big conversation about how energy efficient that can be done. And I'm sure we're gonna make improvements. But just going back to hydrogen, so what I heard you say is you don't believe that hydrogen is the future of trucking. Is there something else that's might be the future of trucking other than electricity and diesel? Cuz diesel's gonna be around for a while yet. Well,

Jim Park, Journalist: 25:01

the answer to that question is blindingly obvious natural gas. Okay. Especially renewable natural gas made from, you know, biodigesters and manure ponds and landfill sites. Mm-hmm. You know, if you go back to what I was saying about hydrogen, they make hydrogen from natural gas. Methane. Yeah. You said natural gas and go through all this stupid process. Why not just run trucks on natural gas? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're slow here in Canada on the uptake. I've been, you know, I've spoken with people from Enbridge and you know, there's, oh, something like 0.08% of the trucks in Ontario are running on natural gas right now. Mm-hmm. Very, very tiny number in California where they have incentives and programs in place. 98% of the trucks that are burning natural gas in that state are running on renewable natural gas. Wow. In fact, wow. They tell me they're running out of tailpipes to put the stuff in. And they're producing so much of it now because of all the tax credits to, you know, tap this stuff from wild landfills and what have you. Yep. And just, just so you know, renewable natural gas is, is kind of a, a misnomer. Um, especially the n-word, uh, people go, ah, natural gas. It's, it's a, it's a methane product that's derived from, uh, biodegradable organic material like waste, not couches, but food. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, manure ponds, uh, biodigesters, plant waste, algae, you name it. All this stuff when it decays, produces enormous amounts of methane. So the, the, the beauty of this is you get.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 26:46

Now that we've, we've overcome Jim's technical. Uh, difficulty, you were just saying about natural gas and the fact that it's a methane product.

Jim Park, Journalist: 26:57

Yeah. At, at the end of the day, natural gas, you know, that we run in our stove, uh, the stuff that actually burns is methane. Mm-hmm. And it's ironically the same stuff that's produced by biodigesters and landfill sites and, you know, all sorts of other sources. So when you call something natural gas, everybody goes, oh my god, fossil fuels, you know, the oil patch, uh, shale, fracking, blah, blah, blah. They get all excited. That is a problem. There's no doubt about that. I've got some figures on fugitive emissions as well that are kind of scary. Uh, but when you take, a methane product from a manure pond, capture it, clean it up, and then burn it in a truck, you're accomplishing. Two things, two ways of reducing carbon. First you're removing that stream of methane from ever entering the atmosphere cuz you've captured it. Mm-hmm. Then you burn it in a truck, you make it go away. And the carbon intensity figures from burning renewable natural gas in a truck, which is already cleaner than diesel from a CO2 point of view, is you get a double benefit. And depending on the source, even the California, uh, air Resources board and the EPA have charts and figures that that cite some, some forms of methane used in a re renewable natural gas environment can be as much as 300% lower Wow than CO2 produced by a diesel. And people are hundred percent

John Farquhar, Summit Risk Solutions: 28:36

and people are pretty good at, uh, creating waste. That interns will create that we're

Jim Park, Journalist: 28:42

very good at creating waste. Yeah.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 28:44

Yeah. Well, whether it's, well, there's, there's

Jim Park, Journalist: 28:47

a truck fleet in Indiana. fleet in Indiana that burns renewable natural gas from their manure ponds. It's a dairy farm. They have 500 cattle, cows, 50 trucks, and the output from that manure pond powers those 50 trucks every day. Plus it runs the entire facility, the entire dairy, and they sell stuff back to the grid. Wow. 500 cows do all that.

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 29:13

Geez.

Jim Park, Journalist: 29:14

Why aren't

Chris Harris, Safety Dawg: 29:14

we moving more to natural gas? I didn't catch what you said there. Yeah. Yeah. What.

Jim Park, Journalist: 29:20

It's, it's the N word. The environmental activists won't get past the fact that it's natural gas. It isn't, I mean, we should be calling it something else. R N G is the sort of standard term for it. Renewable natural gas. Right. But they've still got the n word in it, and I don't think they can get their heads around that. Mm-hmm. Uh, Ontario, uh, again, I've spoken to the Enbridge people and they've got a couple of trials going on at a few landfill sites. In fact, there's one here in St. Catherine's at the Walker Brothers quarry. They're just playing with it. Now. They're, they're dipping their toes in the pond. Whereas in California, you've had, you know, the waste hauling fleets literally driving into the landfill site to dump their garbage. They drive around the other side of the landfill site, hook up a hose and take the methane off the garbage. They just literally dumped and drive out the gate. It's a circular economy. They, they provide their own fuel by bringing in the waste products to the landfill. It's, it's been running down there for 10 years like that. Wow. And wow, that's quite a, we're figuring that out here now. Way behind the times. And, you know, we've got this initiative in Canada now, the hydrogen economy. We're, we're going to move this forward and, you know, become a world leader in hydrogen production. Well, hell, okay. Do what you wanna do. You know, I'm not gonna argue with the politicians and the environmentalists, but, dumb little Jim Park thinks there's probably a better way. And, uh, I, I know landfills are, are great source of this product. We've got lots of dairy cattle around the province of Ontario dairy farms all over, especially Eastern Ontario. Sure. I don't know what they do with their, with their methane. Uh, they're manure ponds, but, certainly there's a huge resource here that's going untapped. And, you know, methane, uh, natural gas really got a bad wrap. Uh, with that Cummins 12 liter engine. I mean, it doesn't work very well. It's underpowered for what we do here in Ontario. everybody was on board with that 15 liter h uh, high pressure direct injection engine from Cummins Westport. They pulled it off the market. Everybody was, oh no, what are we gonna do? Well, Cummins is coming out with a new 15 liter natural gas engine, which I had a ride in down in California. Didn't get to drive it yet, but, Cummins is really excited about that. really could be a game changer if, if truck fleets can get a 15 liter engine powered by natural gas that'll run on renewable natural gas, that might be the ticket that might. Pretty much finish off hydrogen as far as a fuel for the future's concerned. it's there. No, we've got, we're swimming in this stuff. Mm-hmm. Let's put it's put it to good use. I know we ended that a little abruptly, didn't we? My apologies for that. But Jim has so much information that we decided to make this interview into two episodes, so join us next week for the conclusion where Jim starts to talk about safety. What did he see at this recent truck show? Uh, in regards to safety and advancements for the trucks and for the drivers. So join us next week on the Trucking Risk and Insurance Podcast. And don't forget to click like and subscribe. We'd appreciate it so much. Leave comments down below, John or I will answer them. Thanks so much. That's it for this week.