00:00:03 Speaker 1
Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast, with your host, KC Yost. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry. Whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your knowledge transfer hub. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline.

00:00:27 KC Yost
Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Energy Pipeline Podcast. Today, we'll be taking a look at the evolution of engines, particularly in the oil and gas industry. Now, some of you that follow me on LinkedIn might remember my From Whence We Came series of posts that I did four or five years ago, where we discussed how pipelines were constructed in the early 20th century. One of those posts showed the 1930s ditching machine that what my father and I believed to be run by a fire tube engine generating as much as 15 horsepower. Discussing some of my posts got us thinking about how far off- road engines have evolved and the future of diesel engines. Fun fact, did you know that Caterpillar has been manufacturing off- road engine equipment for over 90 years? To help us understand the evolution of engines and to talk about the new generation of diesel engines, our guest today is Allen Chen, product expert and multi- patent holder from Cat Industrial Power Systems, that is the part of Caterpillar that engineers and manufactures world- class engines. Welcome to the Energy Podcast, Allen.

00:01:46 Allen Chen
Thanks KC. Glad to be here, thank you for having me.

00:01:51 KC Yost
Glad you could join us. If you would please, Allen, take a few minutes to share your background with our listeners.

00:01:58 Allen Chen
Sure. I finished my double degree in biomedical and mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. And after that, I came to work at Caterpillar in 2012. I have 10 years in engineering and I started my career in simulation, doing the background work to help design things. And then I moved over to the design side, where I had the privilege of working on this engine as my first big project. And since then, in the last couple of years, I've made the switch over to marketing.

00:02:39 KC Yost
Excellent, excellent. When you say this engine, we're specifically going to be talking about the cat C13D engine.

00:02:51 Allen Chen
That's correct, that's correct.

00:02:53 KC Yost
Okay. We'll get to that in a little bit. And by the way, you guys are going to be fascinated by all of the work that these people have done in creating the 13D. Let's be clear, those of you who know me know that I haven't changed the oil in my car since fuel injection was created, so 50 years ago, whatever. And because I'm a simple engineer, I wanted to make sure that we asked the right questions. We've written down some questions for you to make sure that I use the right terminology. With that said, may I get to the questions?

00:03:28 Allen Chen
Let's do it.

00:03:29 KC Yost
Okay, good. Let's talk about the evolution. Engines have evolved from that 15 horsepower engine that I talked about in From Whence We Came series, through the last generation in the last century. Can you talk about the evolution and how we got to the engines you see in oil and gas equipment today?

00:03:53 Allen Chen
Sure, I can certainly try my best. I'm definitely not a certified historian by any means but I can at least give you the high level from let's say, a Caterpillar perspective. How was that?

00:04:08 KC Yost
That's perfect. Perfect.

00:04:09 Allen Chen
Okay. Going back maybe to Holton Best back in 1904, where they first looked at doing the tractor, after they merged in 1925 to make the tractor company, they were actually looking for a power plant or a motor or an engine, whichever you want to call it. And unfortunately, they couldn't find one that packaged well in their chassis for the right amount of power to weight ratio. And back then, most people used some gasoline or inaudible engine, but prices for diesel were actually becoming more favorable. People decided they wanted to switch over to diesel, plus it ran at slower speeds, which has implications for durability, and they had more torque, which is good for doing work. People decided to adopt this diesel engine. Caterpillar was looking for an engine, they couldn't find one, so they made their own. And for the first time in 1931, they began making their Old Betsy, if you're familiar with that.

00:05:27 KC Yost
I've heard the term. I've heard the term, sure. Yeah.

00:05:31 Allen Chen
Yes. And those were known as the D Series. Fun fact, there was a D9900 inline four cylinder engine I believe, and it was putting out something like 63 horsepower. Today, we're going to talk about an engine that can do in excess of 700 horsepower. We have come a long way, so to speak, and we've also reduced weight by quite a bit. That thing was maybe 5, 200 pounds or so, and we've cut that down by more than 30% just by optimizing the engine.

00:06:11 KC Yost
Essentially what we're looking at is the off- road engine version of what it took on the Apollo series to get to the moon, the computer mass that was required there compared to our cell phone today, much lighter, much smaller and much more computing capability. Here, you've got much lighter, much smaller and an exponential horsepower differential.

00:06:40 Allen Chen
Yes, that's a great analogy. Yes, indeed. And then...

00:06:43 KC Yost
Cool, okay. Sorry.

00:06:46 Allen Chen
Do you want- Yeah.

00:06:47 KC Yost
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

00:06:50 Allen Chen
I guess, fast- forward maybe to... I want to say post- World War II, we started taking up technologies like supercharging and turbocharging. The point of that really is to get more air into the engine because more air and fuel means more power. Supercharging and turbocharging helps to force that air in there and you force more fuel in there to make more power. As we continue that journey, we've ventured on highway, if you remember some of our trucks with the 1693 engines or maybe you've heard of the A3400 series or maybe the C15. These were revolutionary in their time when they've come up with this pre- combustion chamber fuel strategy, which was a little bit different than your carburetor engines. But things have begun evolving and we've made that staple there as a prominent on- highway engine provider back when we were still making on- highway engines. And then we ultimately introduced our electronic system for those engines as well. You fast- forward again to today in our discussion, unfortunately we don't produce any more new Caterpillar on- highway engines, but we are very devoted to our off- highway segments and we'll continue to be let's say, a leader or bellwether of how the off- highway power segment behaves and performs.

00:08:36 KC Yost
This is amazing. We go from generation to generation to generation to generation in power plants or engines. It's fascinating how as technology comes on, we can introduce new things and develop new processes. When we're talking about creating these new engines, the next generation and all of this, does an engineer just sit in a room and think of ideas or is it more complex than that? When do you get to a point where you say, " All right." And we're going to talk about the C going to D. You look at the Caterpillar 13, 13B, 13C, 13B and 13C as I understand were just iterations and additions and improvements on 13. What makes a decision... Or how does a decision come about to say, " We need to go back to the drawing board and think things over." Because 13D is a brand new engine.

00:09:43 Allen Chen
Yes, yes. Good point. Just for the record, there is no C13C, but there is a 13 and a 13B. We skipped over the C for reasons like the C might be misconstrued, let's say with Caterpillar or something like that, but the D was the name we've chosen. Yes, you're very right, KC. It is a brand new, clean sheet engine. What made us start over? How did that journey go? Well, we knew that we stretched our current legacy platforms as far as we can go. We've pushed power without compromising durability of course, as far as we can go. And if we wanted to make that next step change, we want to make that next big improvement, we knew that we had to start over. And we knew that in order to do something like this, all the parts had to be new. We had to think through the foundation and the fundamentals. How does that process begin? Well, it's not as simple as someone sitting down and just thinking about a new engine, but it is very similar to let's say, how an architect might think through how to lay out the plan of a building. The trick is you need to have a holistic view and not so much focus on one particular component or even subsystem say. You can't focus just on the electrical system or just on the structure, everything has to communicate and work together in unison. If you look hard enough, maybe on the internet, you'll find some of our founding fathers I'll call it, or the grandfathers of this engine. And it really did start off with let's say two or three. We particularly had about three leaders, three specific engineers that sat through and talked about the performance of it, the durability, the power targets of it from a whole system. And of course, this came with a big asterisk. These individuals, highly specialized, they had to first know almost everything there is to know about how an engine functions, at least at a high level, before they attempt to put together all the pieces, if you can imagine. But after they put together those pieces, we brought on the rest of our large and specialized engineering community to flesh out, maybe mature some of the designs and see how it works out. Unfortunately, it's not always going to work out correctly the first time. We might have to start from the drawing board again and again. And in actuality, this engine that we're talking about today, the C13D, wasn't a one- shot get it right the first time. We went back to the drawing board quite a few times.

00:13:06 KC Yost
I don't want to simplify this too much, but frankly what I'm hearing you say is it's analytical problem- solving that every engineer has learned in freshman engineering. Getting to the basics, it's basically sit down, what is your problem? Define the problem, look at solutions, look at modifications, put it together, see if that's what you want, and it solves the problem. If it doesn't, what do you have to do to try and address the problem again? And you go through these iterations until you have the problem solved. But you have these mega experts that are looking at this initially, and then as they have a conceptual idea of what's going on, you bring in if you will, the subject matter specific experts to try to piece everything together to see if that analysis is in fact correct. Simple terms, simple terms?

00:14:08 Allen Chen
Absolutely, absolutely. Yes. Analysis, critical thinking at its finest.

00:14:12 KC Yost
Sure. Well, there you go. There you go. Civil engineering and mechanical engineering had something in common. I like that, I like that, I like that. Let's talk about some of these cutting edge technologies and design principles that were used in developing the C13D, and for that matter, modern heavy duty engines.

00:14:35 Allen Chen
Sure, sure. Just to take a quick pause and reflect on how far simulation has come these days in optimization and large scale computing, you think of the cloud and things like that, if you go back and think about the engines that I mentioned earlier, can you imagine a world where they did this without these simulation routines and still the engines performed really well? There's a lot to be said, it's pretty amazing what they've done.

00:15:08 KC Yost
What we are doing today is building on the foundation that those people set for us 80 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago. We pay homage to those who came before us.

00:15:27 Allen Chen
Absolutely. We're on the shoulders of giants.

00:15:31 KC Yost
There you go, there you go, there you go. Good point.

00:15:35 Allen Chen
Going back... Oh, go ahead.

00:15:37 KC Yost
I'm sorry. Go ahead, go ahead.

00:15:39 Allen Chen
I was going to go back to some of these simulation techniques maybe you were poking at a little bit on the latest technologies or design principles. Some of these have been co- developed with universities or academic circles or governments, but we're obviously deploying them in our commercial matters here. But a lot of it happens in that simulation phase before we even... These days, before we even design or prototype the first piece of iron, we spend thousands and thousands for this project, years simulating and optimizing something, especially the engine performance, before we actually fabricate or build something out to try it. Even though engines have changed throughout the times, the inputs or let's call it the requirements of an engine, have stayed the same. What does an engine do? It makes power. There's performance out of it that you desire, but it depends also these days, are you running somewhere hot? Are you running somewhere cold, somewhere high, somewhere low? All of those affect the performance, so trying to balance that. Of course, the packaging, we want to make that engine as small as possible, compact as possible. And then we have to pay special attention to where accessories go. Things like your air conditioning, where does that compressor go on the engine? Because it is engine driven. Think about...

00:17:23 KC Yost
Excuse me, excuse me while I laugh a little bit. I started out in the mid 70s, and I think it's phenomenal to have air conditioning on the D six or... We didn't have any of that stuff back then. Pretty cool, pretty cool. All right. Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you there. Go ahead.

00:17:43 Allen Chen
No, no, no. It's a fine luxury we have these days indeed. The third one would be a fluids consumption, as in how much fuel are you putting in? And these days, especially in the higher regulation parts of the world, you start adding in things like the diesel exhaust fluid for your after treatment or in certain parts of the world, they call it AdBlue, but all of those, consumption, oil, fuel, after treatments, exhaust fluids, those things add up. And trying to balance that by minimizing that as much as possible. But you still need power so you need to have more fuel and air for power. Striking that balance.

00:18:29 KC Yost
And then... I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:18:32 Allen Chen
Oh, no worries. We talk about some of these maintenance and preventative things like oil filter changes which you thought of earlier, but especially with this engine, we've focused a lot on serviceability and the ease of servicing things like your oil filter to make it so that you do want to change your filter because of how easy it is or removing the necessity of maintaining or servicing certain components. Those things also come into factor. And then lastly, durability. How long do we want this engine to last? Think of a Formula One race car. It makes a thousand something horsepower coming in from a little tiny 1. 6 liter engine, but how long does that last? Maybe one season of racing. But these things for our off highway segments, these engines need to last a long time because we're doing a lot of hard work for a long period of time.

00:19:40 KC Yost
It sounds to me that you listened to your customers regarding power density, torque, fuel efficiency, overall performance, operations cost and maintenance, and used all of that as the background of as you mentioned, the three engineers getting together to come up with the new 13D. Does that sound right?

00:20:10 Allen Chen
That's correct.

00:20:10 KC Yost
Am I saying that right?

00:20:11 Allen Chen
Absolutely, yes.

00:20:14 KC Yost
Okay. It sounds like the match between engine size and workload and duty cycles is vital for optimal performance.

00:20:25 Allen Chen
Yes.

00:20:26 KC Yost
How can an engine achieve flexibility in offering various power ratings to meet specific applications and requirements? And the point of this is I've watched your YouTube videos okay, and I hear the reference that yes, this is a 13 liter engine... Well, yeah, 12. 9 Liter engine, so you call it the 13 but in reality, it can essentially replace three other power plants because of adjusting here and adjusting there, you can adjust your application. Am I saying all of that right?

00:21:08 Allen Chen
Yes, yes. This engine has a large enough power range where it covers today's 13 liter, which is as you mentioned, the C13 or C13B. It also has enough power and torque to outperform the C15 and even our single turbo C18 engine. Think of it as a three in one, three engines in one.

00:21:33 KC Yost
Yes. Excellent, excellent. How does the C13D specifically do it? How can you make the adjustments to replace those three power plants?

00:21:50 Allen Chen
That's a very good question. At the core and the heart of it is being able to start over has a lot of merits, there's pros and cons, trade- offs. Not every year you get to start over on something, but the core and the heart of it is good engineering. Starting from scratch using the simulation tools you can use, like you said, analyze, critically think and be able to design something that you want to design, perhaps arguably any mechanical engineer's dream. Certainly it was mine to be able to work on a ground up clean sheet engine like this. But to achieve some of this power and this range we shot for the top, we aimed for the top and how much power it can make at if we try to push this engine as far as possible without compromising durability, of course. And then as I mentioned earlier, air and fuel makes that power. If you begin to throttle it back, then you can achieve the lower power ratings. And fun fact, not everyone wants the maximum amount of power for their machine that this engine is capable of providing. There's other limitations elsewhere in the machine, let's say the transmission or torque converter, other parts of the machine that just can't tolerate that much power, or they don't want that much power coming out of their particular machine, so maybe they can differentiate it as well.

00:23:25 KC Yost
But at the end of the day, the footprint of the engine is small enough that it applies well to those where they don't need that much power or torque or whatever the case may be. It's not as if you're getting something that's oversized and under utilized.

00:23:44 Allen Chen
That's absolutely right. Correct. We've optimized it for that weight and that size. It's a 13 liter package but it can do more than our 18 liter single turbo if the customer is so desired to push that engine that far. absolutely right.

00:24:02 KC Yost
Cool. Very good, very good. Let's talk some buzzwords here. Emissions and sustainability, correctly sizing the unit as we talked about, tuning it down, lifting it up or this, that and the other. How does that correctly sizing an engine contribute to reducing emissions and promoting eco- friendly practices in off- highway operations?

00:24:33 Allen Chen
Sure, sure. When I think about this topic on sustainability, a lot of people focus on carbon, and rightly so. Think about the amount of fuel that we burn now, this engine all of a sudden can make the power of an 18 liter, surely it's burning a lot of fuel or something. But with this newly optimized engine, it's got some advanced controls in it by the way, which we don't have to go into too much detail on, but it optimizes that fuel consumption. And when you optimize that fuel consumption by let's say, lowering it where it didn't need to burn as much fuel, then you're saving on carbon. You're not producing as much carbon there. The thing that most people gravitate towards is that they think a larger engine running let's say slower or at lighter loads, maybe if you oversized the engine let's say, that that would be better for your fuel consumption. But in actuality, the engine is oftentimes optimized to run best when it's running at higher power. It's optimized to do work, and when you provide an oversized engine running at lower power, you're actually sacrificing quite a bit of fuel efficiency. Think about your engine idling all the time, it's burning a lot more fuel than if you were just cruising down the highway at let's say, 60 miles per hour. We've optimized this engine to be able to run efficiently for fuel when it's doing work, but on the off chance that you do want to idle this engine because of its advanced controls, think of it as a smart controller in there, it's tuning it so that it doesn't burn as much fuel as let's say, it used to burn on our legacy engines, all the while giving you the necessary power and meeting emissions.

00:26:50 KC Yost
Translating that into something that the civil engineer can understand, me, what I'm hearing is that you have the technology in place in this engine that allows real- time adjustments based off of the barometric pressure, the humidity, this, that and the other, to make sure that the engine runs properly as compared to the old days where you'd adjust it, get the timing set, you'd let it go forever, regardless whether it was summer, winter, fall or Alaska versus Mexico and that type of thing. Am I reading that right?

00:27:32 Allen Chen
That's right, that's absolutely right.

00:27:35 KC Yost
At the end of the day, that creates if you will, the buzzwords, taking care of emissions and sustainability. Very cool, very cool. We talked about the sizing and how this replaces larger engines, and this, that and the other. And we talked about the footprint of this engine. Let me say that. How do you see engine sizing processes evolving in the future? Are there any emerging trends that's going to enhance engine selection and optimization? Are we going to get to a point where an engine is going to... Instead of a 12.9 liter engine, you're going to have a 6. 9 liter engine doing the same thing here 50 years from now, and people are going to be talking about the 13D the same way I just finished talking about that 1930s tractor.

00:28:32 Allen Chen
Sure, sure. No, that's a good question. I'll try to get out my crystal ball for us forecast into the future here.

00:28:41 KC Yost
Well, you did go to Carnegie Mellon, so I expect big things here.

00:28:47 Allen Chen
I think right now... This technology by the way, isn't really emerging for us. We've been on this journey for a long time, 35 years or more. But what's currently really interesting to me is this idea of hybridization, especially in this medium to heavy duty engine space. This is where the power is. We could perhaps stretch the power of this engine by adding some motor generating unit driven off of a battery or something like that, where it just gives it that extra bit of power or torque to push it even further. And then this idea, as you mentioned earlier, on the smaller engine, six seven liter things, that idea translates down and up the spectrum of power or displacement of the engine. This hybridization could be a path moving forward to balance the needs of our customers. That's what I want to convey as important, is that the customers still want power, they still need performance. And if you want to move let's say, to an engine that you say is half the size but you still want to recover that power, you would need a little bit of a handicap, something to help you out. And that's where that hybrid technology comes in. You can also apply that let's say, to some alternative fuel discussions that are happening around the world. People are focusing on hydrogen and I think most people know and appreciate hydrogen in terms of the power capability just isn't equivalent to diesel right now. For example, if I tried to make a C13D into a hydrogen, hitting 515 kilowatts from a raw hydrogen point of view probably isn't physically possible. Not probably, it isn't physically possible. But if you wanted to get that power back to provide value to our machines, to our customers, then you're going to have to add some hybrid power to it to push it back to that same level as the diesel engine.

00:31:17 KC Yost
Cool, cool. Getting close to the end of our time, let me wrap up with this question here. Do you have a recommendation for oil and gas equipment manufacturers and businesses involved in off highway applications who want to become more efficient while also working to minimize the impact of the environment?

00:31:42 Allen Chen
Yes. Perhaps a simple one. If you focus on the life cycle carbon emissions of your machinery, of course if you move over to to biofuels, things like the 100% HVO or if you find some B100, which is the biodiesel B100, those are all excellent stepping stones on helping with sustainability but also getting the power that you need. I think the overall guidance is just contact, if you're ever not sure, contact your local Cat dealer and look through the fluids guides. It's pretty extensive, it's pretty detailed on what kinds of fuels we recommend using in our power plants. And we'll go from there.

00:32:34 KC Yost
Are you saying that Cat engines can use HVO and other fuels without having to make any updates in the engine itself? Is that what you're saying?

00:32:44 Allen Chen
That's more or less right on the engine side. The 100% HVO for example, that is currently allowed on all of our IPSD or industrial power systems engines, anything as small as a 0. 5 liter, a C0. 5, all the way up to things as high as the C18 that I mentioned, and even beyond, C27, C32s, even higher than that. They can use the 100% HVO. We call this drop- in replacement for your diesel. You don't need to make any augmentations to your engine, and you can run these kinds of fuels.

00:33:30 KC Yost
That's amazing, that's amazing. My grandfather was a mechanic for a natural gas company back in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s. Well, retired in 1960, and he would just be blown away with the engines that you guys have nowadays. That's really impressive, really impressive. Anyway, as we try to wrap this up, is there anything else you'd like to add? Any points that I might've missed that you want to tell to the listeners?

00:34:09 Allen Chen
I would say no, but maybe a call to action. If people do want to know more about this engine, the C13D, the specifics, of course you can always find more information at cat. com/ aC13D. It has been launched to the public, so there should be plenty of good information out there. And if they ever needed more, like I mentioned earlier, contact your local Cat dealer. They'll be able to get them what they need.

00:34:39 KC Yost
And the C13D will be available in 2025, is that correct?

00:34:46 Allen Chen
2026 is production year.

00:34:48 KC Yost
Okay, 2026. We're 18 months out, two years out.

00:34:55 Allen Chen
Yes, yes.

00:34:55 KC Yost
Very good, very good. All right. Thanks, Allen, for taking the time to visit with us today. As Allen just mentioned, if anyone would like to learn more about the Cat C13D, you can find it on the web at cat. com/ 13D. Thanks to all of you for tuning into this episode of the Energy Pipeline Podcast, sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and Gas. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for podcast topics, feel free to email me at KC. yost @ oggn. com. I also want to thank my producer, Anastacia Willison Duth, and everyone at the Oil and Gas Global Network for making this podcast possible. Find out more about OGGN podcasts at oggn. com. This is KC Yost, saying goodbye for now. Have a great week and keep the energy flowing through the pipeline.

00:35:48 Speaker 1
Come back next week for another episode of the Energy Pipeline, a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. To learn more, go to oggn. com.