Last month, I wrote about the work that many of the crane industry’s leading experts and associations have been doing to agree on changes to EU mobile crane standards that are acceptable to users around the world. Part of the reason why people are doing this hard work is to make it easier to sell similar designs for cranes around the world, and to help protect resale values by making it easier to sell cranes secondhand internationally.
There are still obstacles to this vision of a single global market for cranes though. A new obstacle apparent at ConExpo was the new engine emissions standards, Tier 4 Interim in the US and Stage III B in the EU. The new standards reduce the allowable limits of emissions to almost zero. The aims of the standards are undoubtedly admirable. However, they do create some challenges for crane builders and users.
First, engines built to the standard are bigger, taking up more space on the crane carrier. This necessitates changes to the crane design. Crane builders I spoke to at ConExpo, who have built new cranes in line with the standard, said this was a challenge, but not overwhelming. Kobelco, for example, managed to not only fit a new generation of engines to their crawler cranes, but to make the crane slightly narrower, easing transport.
The second problem could end up being more serious, both for crane builders and for customers. Cranes designed to the new US standard require ultra low sulphur diesel (ULSD) to run. That’s fine in the US, where the fuel is easily available. Outside the US though, users of these cranes won’t be able to find fuel for them. For now, that means crane manufacturers must use different engines for different markets. In five to ten years time, when US buyers want to sell their cranes to businesses in, say, Brazil, they may not be able to.
That’s not going to be an easy problem to get around. It isn’t something that can be easily fixed by crane builders; it’s certainly not one that can be solved by crane users. Ultimately, it will either be up to engine manufacturers to come up with designs that will work with different fuel types, or for politicians around the world to push the development of ULSD supplies. Both seem pretty unlikely. For now, it may be worth considering where you will eventually be able to sell your crane, when you’re working out what it will cost you.
