 Nett's Mississauga headquarters |
The California Air Resources Board (ARB) has verified a retrofit emission control system from Nett Technologies Inc for use on off-road large spark ignition (LSI) engines with a displacement exceeding three litres.
Principally, the engines power forklifts, sweeper/scrubbers, industrial tow tractors and airport ground support equipment.
A 20 April ARB executive order provides the verification for the Nett BlueCat 300 system. The verified system limits emissions to not more than 2.7 grams of nitrogen oxides (NOx), hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide (HC) per kilowatt hour.
"The Nett engineering department (in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada) submitted our test results to ARB on 17 February," says Wayne Moffat, Nett senior technical sales representative for California. "We accumulated a waiting list (of potential buyers) up to the date of the ARB executive order and then began sales."
Multiple forklift models with engines in the 3-to 6-liter niche use a 4.3-litre displacement General Motors engine, Moffat notes. Many in the ground support equipment segment use a 4.9 litre displacement Ford engine.
The executive order follows a 16 April ARB program advisory that allows fleet operators to exclude fully emission controlled late-model year fleets with those sized engines from their fleet-average calculations until 15 April 2010.
In addition, ARB extended a deadline for determining compliance with a 1 January, 2009 fleet-average emission-level standard. ARB agreed to allow LSI equipment with greater than three-litre engines and compliant retrofit kits to be incorporated into the average if the equipment is leased or purchased by 15 April, 2010 and the kits are installed by 31 December 2010.
An ARB executive order of June 2008 verified the TermiNOx emission control system from Engine Control Systems (ECS) for use on engines with displacement greater than three litres. The TermiNOx system limits emissions to 4 grams of NOx and HC per kW-hour. ECS of Thornhill, Ontario, Canada is a unit of Oxnard, California-based Catalytic Solutions Inc.
Other ARB executive orders, also in June 2008, verified Nett and ESC emission control systems for retrofitting LSI engines with displacements of 1 to 3 litres.
Nett and ECS compete in the retrofit market. A retrofit emission control system may cost USD3,000 to USD5,000 per forklift.
Sacramento-based ARB is a regulatory unit of the California Environmental Protection Agency.