Gaynor Hartnell, CEO of the RFTA interviews Stewart Hymas, MD of Alfred Hymas at Road Expo 2024, after he gave a presentation on why they use high blend biodiesel.
Click to jump straight to Stuart’s summary of the pros and cons.
Hello Stuart, do you want to introduce Alfred Hymas and tell us about your fleet?
I’m the managing director of Alfred Hymas. We’re a bulk tipper operator, with a fleet of seventy-five 44-tonne trucks, which we are using all day long. We want to carry as much weight as we can, as we get paid by the tonne. We move agricultural products, sand, gravel, limestone etc. We’ve got Renault, Volvo, and a few Mercs and Scanias. We long-life them, and many of them are around 9 years old.
They typically do around 110,000kms a year, single-shifted. The drivers will leave the yard on a Monday morning and come back on Friday night or Saturday morning, and over that time the truck will be their home.
And how do you fuel them?
We’re very fortunate as we can fuel our trucks on site. This allows us to be flexible. We have 140,000 litres of fuel on our site, in two large tanks and that gives us the ability to do what we do. We use B30 from Argent. They suggested it back in 2018, and there was a slight price advantage. Obviously, we were interested to reduce our carbon footprint, but at that time we had little or no interest from our customers in that aspect. Anyhow we started using B20 in 2019 and then went on to B30.
What did you have to do in preparation for using the biodiesel?
We had to make sure our tanks were clean. Basically, we just sucked everything out the tanks, cleaned them and started again. To be fair, they were fairly clean. We use a huge amount of fuel, so the turnover is continual.
We also put some additional filtration in. Both tanks have got canisters on with 100 micron inline filtering, plus another on each of the fuel lines going to the pumps. We have 4 pumps in our yard. These filters just sit there, and we routinely change them once every six months.
Did you consider alternatives, like HVO or biomethane?
We need to maximise the payload, so we look to save weight and chassis space wherever we possibly can. We’ve got hydraulics on our tractor units which limits space for things like CNG tanks. Plus, the upfront costs for buying gas trucks are much greater.
We looked at electric, but we could barely get enough electricity for their own workshops let alone recharging any trucks, plus charging would be difficult when the drivers are out and about.
We don’t have the ability to recover extra costs that others might. Our customers are not prepared to pick those costs up. Even with HVO, which would be very easy to drop in, and the cost is coming down, it’s still too much for us to justify. It would wipe out our profit margin.
People often cite concerns over warranties as a reason for not moving to high blend biodiesel. What’s your take on that?
Well, we maintain our own vehicles so we have complete control of the servicing. From the minute we get a truck, brand new, we don’t use any of the manufacturers’ servicing processes. We do it all in-house. Plus, we also do other fleets. We maintain as many trucks for other people as we do for ourselves, and we don’t see any difference in the requirement for oil changes or fuel filters.
What about fuel waxing?
We’re not using B30 all year round, during the winter we drop down to B20 or maybe even B10 or B15, depending how cold it is. Our supplier, Argent, manages that and so we don’t see any fuel waxing problems whatsoever.
Argent, and other RTFA members, find Zemo’s Renewable Fuel Accreditation Scheme really helpful in demonstrating the savings they are achieving for their customers. Is that something you value?
Every quarter Zemo sends us a certificate telling us how many thousand litres we’ve used and what our carbon savings have been. We achieved 26% GHG savings, compared to B7 in Q 4 last year. That’s a big amount of saving, achieved very easily. It might not be as sexy as having a big electric truck on a picture in front of Hymas, but it’s doing the same thing. We can send those certificates off to our customers if they so wish.
Can you summarise the pros and cons for me, Stewart?
- The vehicles don’t need to be converted in any way at all. It’s an immediate transition, it can be done straight away, dead simple.
- We can access all the fuel networks, so the trucks out about can run on B7, if they need to. We don’t want to be going off our routes at all to refuel.
- There’s no additional driver training required.
- Fuel waxing is not a problem, as it’s completely controlled by the supplier by dropping the blend during winter and we haven’t seen any issue with that
- We’ve got the periodic changes of tank filters, but we maintain trucks as our day job, so that’s no problem.
- All in all it’s been very straightforward and a very cheap way of reducing our carbon footprint.
