New Holland’s Alternative Fuel Tractors

I spoke with New Holland’s Joe Bouffard at the World Ag Expo in February, and he says there are some new and exciting things happening at New Holland.

“The T6.180 methane powered tractor, and what we like to say about this tractor is that it was designed to greatly reduce emissions while maximizing productivity without sacrificing performance, and we do that number of ways. So the emissions piece is it's got 80% fewer emissions than a Tier4B tractor, which is the current standard for North America. And that's done in various ways of a reduced particulate matter, reduced nitrous oxide, reduced carbon dioxide, that type of thing. The profitability piece is that the tractor has a reduced running cost of 20 to 30 percent based on a diesel tractor, just when you consider the cost of fuel of diesel versus GHC. Um, and then the sacrificing performance piece is that our partner FTP designed the engine to have the exact same power and torque as the diesel version, so there's no loss and productivity for that tractor.”

“Our sustainability strategy or alternative fuel strategy doesn't stop there. We have a battery electric vehicle that's for lower horsepower tractor as well that we should see probably in the next 18 months or so, and then we are also launching a T7 tractor, which is the next size up that will run on either compressed natural gas or liquefied natural gas.”