WIPP Helps Lower Emissions by Recruiting New ‘Green’ Salt Haul Truck

CARLSBAD, N.M. – There’s a big new "Cat" on the prowl at EM’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).

It might look like the bright yellow salt haul truck it replaces at the nation’s only transuranic waste repository, but the newest piece of machinery is far more advanced than its predecessor.

The new Caterpillar 770G is an environmentally friendly, 40-ton hunk of technology and brawn that will carry salt from WIPP’s salt hoist to surface stockpiles. It takes five trips of the salt hoist to fill it up.

While the new model might resemble the 770 model it replaces on the outside, it’s anything but under the sheet metal.

Instead of exhausting carbon soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide like a standard diesel, the 770G features a Tier IV Final diesel engine that uses a prodigious amount of technology to reduce tailpipe emissions to water and carbon dioxide. The engine accomplishes low emission numbers by using multiple major technologies, including a secondary chamber that burns the soot that would go out the exhaust of previous diesels.

Tier 4 diesel engine standards are the Environmental Protection Agency’s strictest mandated emissions requirements for off-highway diesel engines. The requirement regulates the amount of particulate matter, or black soot, and nitrogen oxide that can be emitted from an off-highway diesel engine.

Based on an engine’s horsepower rating, Tier 4 requirements were phased in starting in 2008. By the time Tier 4 regulations were fully implemented in 2015, particulate matter and nitrogen oxide emissions had been reduced 99% compared to 1996 levels.

Tier IV also is the technology being retrofitted onto diesel engines in the WIPP underground to reduce emissions.

The new 770G model, which arrived in early January, replaces a standard-diesel 770 model obtained in January 2010 that has 4,948 operating hours. The former is being sent out to be refurbished for use as a backup.

Hoist crew drivers were briefed on the new model’s maintenance and operations features inside a giant shed that houses WIPP’s two big trucks.

The trucks have been redesigned with major advancements in emissions control technology, transmission and traction control systems; frame, drivetrain and cooling system enhancements; added operator amenities such as a new seat location that reduces vibration and driver fatigue; and serviceability improvements. The screen to monitor the new electronics is four times larger than the screen in the previous truck.