Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our Propane Presents technology webinar today. As always, we do look forward to bringing you content about new propane-powered technologies and equipment that has entered the marketplace. I am Matt McDonald. I am Director of Off-Road Business Development here at PERC, the Propane Education & Research Council, and I will be your moderator for today's webinar. For a little pre-meeting, just housekeeping, everyone on the webinar is in listen-only mode. You will remain muted throughout the presentation. If you have a question, just use the toolbar, click the question or chat button to submit your questions and we will collect those items and address as many questions as we can throughout the time scheduled. With me today is Bob Panora. Bob is President and COO at Tecogen.
Today, Bob will be introducing you to Tecogen and its Ultera system, how this catalyst system will reduce forklift tailpipe emissions to near zero. Propane forklifts, as we all know, are already some of the cleanest burning engines in use today. However, as we move into the future, it's important that we focus on even lower emissions, cleaner burning technologies, and what that next generation forklift looks like. Good afternoon, Bob. Welcome. I appreciate you being here as we all do.
Thank you.
Look forward to hear, sir.
Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining in today on this presentation. I really appreciate it. I'll get started by introducing everyone to the topics I'll cover. Let's see if I can change the slide. There it is. The topics today I'll be covering. I want to make the slide advance first. Let's see how long it takes. There we go. It's a little bit slow, but I'm sorry for that. This is the topics I'm going to cover today. First off, I'll tell you a little bit about the company, Tecogen. It is probably not a household word for many of us. Then I'll go on to talk about the background of the technology. The emission system is commercialized under the trade name Ultera .
I'll talk mostly about the application to fork trucks, and that'll cover regulatory issues that are important, the work we've done with MCFA, and then we'll get into the performance of the product and the status. Lastly, I will talk about a new agreement we have with Origin Engines. That's a different licensee that we've signed up. Finally, I'll close talking about the future and give some final thoughts. Then we'll move on to questions. Tecogen. We're a company located in Massachusetts, and we are primarily a cogeneration CHP OEM. We have a group that does installation and service, and we have eight or nine service centers around the country, including a new one in Toronto that just opened a few months ago.
We also sell the emissions technology to people who want to have extra low emissions, say, for a microgrid or whatever, usually in California. Our product lines go back to the early 1980s, and the product on the far right was our original product that's been upgraded, of course, over time. It's now called the Tecop ower. It is a very simple cogeneration module that works well, cost-effective, and its rating is about 75 KW, depending on which model you purchase. Today, the modern flagship product of the company is the InVerde e+. That's the machine on the left. That product produces 125 KW, but it's got a lot of technology built into it that the older product didn't. The technology primarily revolves around inverter technology, or IGBTs, I guess as the device is commonly known.
What we've built into the product is that it's able to operate at a variable speed, including a sprint mode for a demand management response, or if it's nighttime and the load had gone down, it can slow down to, say, 1,000 RPM and operate at basically the same high efficiency as it does at full load. It also has two other advantages. We built the product as a state that it could operate either parallel with the grid, but also as a standby blackout operating machine. That's a tricky line to walk because the utilities are very contentious when synchronous generators are proposed on their network. The safeties that are built into the inverter, which is certified, helps with that problem. Lastly, it involves a microgrid technology that's called CERTS.
I won't go into that other than to say we purchased it, license for that from the University of Wisconsin. It enables us to run multiple machines with very simplified controls on the same circuit, and it's stable, shares the load equally, and so forth. In the middle of the screen is another product line we have that we call TECOCHILL. It's an air conditioning product that's a chiller. Conceptually what we do is we remove the engine I'm sorry, remove the motor from the machine and replace it with an engine. Hence we have an engine-driven chiller that has very high efficiency and offers the opportunity for heat recovery, just like in the cogen application. The primary application for this product would be the same places that use large chillers. That would be big buildings, hospitals, hotels, and a whole slew of industrial applications.
The most popular application these days is skating rinks. We do a lot of skating rinks, and the heat is used to melt the ice that's shaved off by the Zamboni, and it's also used for dehumidification. Indoor cultivation is another big industrial area that we sell to. Primarily, but not exclusively, cannabis, believe it or not, which has grown a lot in the last few years. I want to talk about where the technology came from and how it works. It's an interesting story. About 15 years ago, in Southern California, the regulators, the South Coast Regulators in the L.A. area, what they did was, unannounced, they knocked on the doors of a number of gas engines that were operating. I think it was well over 100. What they found was there was widespread non-compliance.
I won't get into the details, but it was pretty bad. It was not a good look for our industry. We were a minor subset of all the other engines that were caught up in this, but it was quite an embarrassment. Consequently, we had a bunch of work groups with the regulators, and after a year or two, trying to tell them that we knew what we were doing, we had a good technology, they concluded that we, in fact, didn't. I think they were right. I think that was true. What happened after that, let me just get the slide to advance. After that, what they did was they lowered the emissions requirement you would have if you were a new product, but they also made it much more difficult to continue to work there.
In fact, the lowering of the emissions standard was really on powered fuel cells. The engine industry, natural gas engines, cogeneration, was really in a tough place right then. At that time, we were awarded a contract by the California Energy Commission and SoCalGas to try to solve that problem. Frankly, I didn't give it much chance. I thought to get to those levels reliably would be next to impossible. In the last few months of the program, we achieved a groundbreaking breakthrough, and that we call, as I said earlier, is the Ultera, the commercialized name. What it allowed us to do was operate natural gas engines in the range, as far as emissions are concerned, of fuel cells. We patented it in 2013, and then went on to patent it internationally as well. There are supporting patents that have since been obtained as well.
It's widely deployed in our products including SoCalGas. We use that technology everywhere we go, basically. It's allowed us to permit our engines into that very difficult Southern California standards. Over the 10 years, hundreds of engines, thousands of hours we've accumulated, and the technology, we're very confident in it. This chart I put together that helps put some numbers out there, what we've accomplished. If you look at engine BACT, which would be the federal government, the EPA saying, "This is what an engine should produce for emissions." You see the CO is quite high. NOx, on the other hand, they want to see a lower number. The horizontal lines that are on the chart represent where California, Southern California went in the end. Very low CO and very low NOx. I've shown on the chart third-party testing of a fuel cell.
It was a report published by the CEC, and I think there was about 19 fuel cells in that group. They were tested, and they do give out a little bit of NOx, and they do give out a little bit of CO, and that's from the reforming that's done to make the natural gas into hydrogen. If you look at our values, and that's a machine that ran over 8,000 hours, it was its annual certified test. It achieved almost the same levels, which is quite remarkable. That's the technology, how it came to pass. Our backs were up against the wall, and we really wanted to continue to do business. We perceived that these emissions requirements would migrate, and they certainly did. Very similar values are required now in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and some of the eastern states.
We were fortunate to have a solution to that problem. How does it work? In the closing months of that program with SoCalGas and the CEC, we went back to an old style of emission system that had been on automobiles in the 1980s. What they did was, they had separated the system in the process into two catalysts, a stage one and a stage two. They would inject air in between the two stages. That was because they didn't have a good three-way system at the time that did everything all in one step. You can see what happens, it allows you to really focus on NOx in the first stage, and then you do the oxidation reactions in the second stage by adding a little bit of air.
What we didn't realize, and I think probably people who are in the industry probably knew, is this doesn't work. The reason why it doesn't work is you've added air, nitrogen and oxygen, in between the two catalysts. That air is heated up to 1,000 degrees, 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, and then it passes through the second stage catalyst. Under those conditions with a catalyst, you make NOx from the N2 and the O2. You've gone around in a circle. You have NOx that's not that high a concentration, but it's high enough to make this system not viable, with the emissions levels we're trying to achieve. That was a problem.
We went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and said, "How can we get around this problem?" What we thought might happen is if we, or we hoped might happen, it was if we cool the gases and the products of combustion going between the two stages and enter the second stage at a low temperature, possibly the bad reactions, NOx formation, might not occur. They might not have enough energy. The oxidation reactions, hydrocarbons and CO made into CO2 and water, that might happen and that's exactly what occurred. The NOx reformation was held to near zero and we found that because the system, the way it operated, that we'd be very tolerant of excursions in Air-Fuel Ratio. In other words, we could go from a window, a sweet spot, if you will, for getting good emissions from 1x to 4x .
That had been the root of all the problems with three-way catalysts in engines that still exist today for other systems. In summary, it's a very simple process. You just need stage one, high temperature, stage two, low temperature, and you've got the recipe for what we do. Of course, we introduce a little bit of air to promote the oxidation reactions at the end. If you look what's happened since then, in addition to putting it on our own products, we've been able to transfer it to a number of engines and platforms, and it works the same every time. We've done gasoline, we've done propane, and we've done, of course, natural gas. Let me see. I have a chart here, if I remember. I put together this chart some time ago just to show some actual third-party testing that's been done.
You can see we have our products, which are GM, we have Ford products, Caterpillar, and we have gasoline Otto cycle engines as well. In every case, the chemistry works the same. You see the same type of reductions, and you can get really good NOx and really good CO and hydrocarbons in the same system, which is very powerful. Now I want to add one thing that I should mention. The odd thing about this standard that was enacted in SoCalGas was that they put a very low NOx value on the table. That's typical. The CO is usually left at a very high value. Automobile regulations, they allow a high CO, so on and so forth. What's strange here is they put the CO had to be at a very low value. Most NOx technologies that I've seen don't really address that problem.
The fact that they don't is okay for certain applications, but in the forklift application, you do want to get the CO down. There is a benefit to doing that because much time you're inside, most applications. Here's a photo album of some of the work we've done with this technology. We've done a number of standby generators. These are typically Ford, but we've done a Hino type. I think all these are natural gas. The model that we use in this picture is a Generac, and we put the device on the roof and we've been able to permit these. This unit was permitted in Pasadena. We've done a number of water pumping engines, and these would be municipalities that pump water using, in this case, a Caterpillar, a natural gas engine.
We've added the device to the exhaust, and that municipality has greatly reduced their difficulties with meeting the regulations in Southern California. In fact, they told me they were flunking the test they had to do every other week, then write a novel at the end, why they were bad. Once they put our system in, that was it. They never had to do that again. It does really make you sleep good at night to know that you're going to pass. Lastly, we have the MCFA fork truck program, which I'm gonna, of course, talk to more in a minute. I guess I put up this chart here. It's the AVL company, which is a big German dyno test company where we did the work with the gasoline vehicles. The chart on the right is the driving cycle. That's the federal government driving cycle.
Although it doesn't look it, when you actually see it being tested, it's really like driving with Daisy. It's a very easy cycle to pass. In the test that we did there, we again had the very typical performance. You got almost all the CO reduced. NMOG, which is non-methane organic gases, I guess, is what that is. 86% was reduced. The NOx was reduced by 20%, which is actually a surprise because we hadn't done any tuning on the engine, and we later identified a mechanism that is actually reducing NOx in the chemistry as well. Anyway, it's worked in all these systems, and now we look at the forklift initiative. I think I mentioned this before, the Ultera process fits well in the forklift application because the engine duty cycle is all over the place.
You're lifting something, you're putting it down, you're driving. It's quite variable. We have that tolerance for AFR ratio excursions that happen when you hit the gas, take it off, and so forth. CO elimination is more valued because the indoor quality consideration comes into play. As I said before, many emissions technologies really focus on the NOx. With that, we began a demonstration program with PERC and with MCFA, which is Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift of America Incorporated. They donated a vehicle, which is shown in the picture, and that was where we applied the technology for the demonstration. Now, I want to talk just for a minute about the regulations, because they're important here as well. This is the California regulatory environment that I'll speak about.
The OEMs are required to test a bare engine, not in the fork truck, but on a dynamometer. They would typically be certified with, you can see the progression on the chart, how things have tightened up over the years. As of 2010, the requirement that everybody follows is the 0.8 NOx plus hydrocarbon. Now, the way they define the pollutant is they combine the NOx and the hydrocarbon into a single chemical compound, if you will, which is annoying. It is annoying because in the truck regulation, NOx is separate. You get this jargon, this discussion that talks about near zero NOx. However, because they've combined them in our application, that jargon doesn't get translated very well. I found even the regulators are confused about that.
In fact, if you really break down the requirement for the trucks and the requirement for the forklifts, it's identical. It really is identical. The jargon is important for how you describe things. They had a little bit of trouble processing when I told them that we have a low NOx, near zero NOx technology. In addition to the OEMs, back to the requirements of the regulators, the fleet operators are required to put their fleet specifications into a computer cloud program. If they achieve a certain average of their fleet, they're okay. If their average goes down, they have to retire some of their fork trucks. That's how it works. What was our goal? Our goal was we wanted to hit that number on the bottom right that you can see here.
We want to hit the 0.1 lowest value for the NOx and hydrocarbons. The CO, as you can see, this is what I spoke about before. It's 20 g/kWh . You don't want to be that high. This is because that regulation is geared toward outdoor impact on the air quality of the neighborhood or the region. It doesn't really speak to what you would want necessarily for an indoor environment. That's the regulatory environment. I think what's happened in the last few months, I want to speak to that. CARB, which everybody knows is the California air reg board. They started an initiative to phase out all IC engine forklifts, and it's separated by size, and it's generally, I think they've talked about an eight-year retirement of the schedule.
They had a public workshop, I think a month later, they had another one that was basically the propane folks talking to them. I did participate in both, and I had the feeling that they are willing to bend a little bit. In the second meeting, I told them about our system, which surprised them. They were confused. They didn't know there was any standard they had that would be considered low NOx, but there is. I think they might be willing to compromise. They may be willing to just go back to their old system, I don't know. Again, maybe there's an opportunity here for the technology if it can be used in special cases or something like that. I'm hopeful.
I want to talk about integration of the system into the MCFA fork truck, and you can see photos of it here as we received it. With the counterweight removed, you can see the catalyst and the, I'll just point here, the catalyst and the big muffler there that they use. GCT is the engine manufacturer, which is an affiliate of Mitsubishi. What I show here is what was configured after we put our system in. We found that the muffler really wasn't needed once we've added this pipework. Everything was more or less the same sound levels. We had plenty of room. The devices you see here would be familiar just thinking about what you'd add from the way I described the process.
We have an exhaust cooler, we have a primary catalyst, I think the secondary catalyst has been removed so you can see what's here. We have two control valves that control the temperature to maintain that sweet spot of 400 degrees. If we look at what we've done on a process diagram, this is what came from MCFA. You see the radiator, the engine, and the primary three-way catalyst. What we've added is a heat exchanger. We've taken a slip stream off the cooling loop to cool the heat exchanger, to cool the exhaust, then we've added a system that maintains the 400 degrees of bypass around the heat exchanger that's hot and mix it with cold, you get the right temperature out. Then there's a second stage catalyst and an air pump that's added. I show the controls here.
This is what we did, you normally would integrate the controls into the main control system of the forklift. Basically, they just adjust those two valves, just like in your shower, you're adjusting the hot and the cold to get the 400 degrees. It wasn't that hard to get that to work very accurately. Worked pretty well under all conditions. That's the legend for the drawing. Let's talk about how it performed and how the system worked. We've started off with a stationary system that we could test, we could bring in a third party with laboratory grade instruments, they would measure against our stuff. We found good agreement with our portable stuff that's lighter and can be used on the fork truck driving around. We also noted that the total hydrocarbon's 52% removal.
These numbers were very similar to what we've seen in all of our other applications. After that, we looked into a drive cycle that we would call our standard test, it's depicted here, the diagram. You can see that we're starting off in the location, doing a couple of lifts, moving to B, doing a couple of lifts, moving to C, doing two lifts. I think typically we do about a 10-minute test, that became our standard. If we look at how we did under those conditions, I've presented these two charts. You see on the left, CO, on the right, NOx. The spikes you see of the solid blue line are what's happening before the Ultera catalyst. The dashed line is post-catalyst, where the CO has been reduced about 93%.
These excursions are what I was referring to earlier in the presentation. It really can be a problem with three-way catalyst systems, where you step on the gas or release the gas, the air-fuel ratio isn't maintained. Hence, you get a spike. Then the reverse is true on the NOx. The NOx shows these spikes as well, we see our 22% improvement from the dashed line. It's the mirror image of what's happening on the left. When you go rich, you have one effect, when you go lean, letting off the gas, you get the other effect. You're never getting quite the best performance out of the system, this compromise is what the Ultera system addresses. At this point, we knew the system was gonna work. We just needed to do some retuning.
We needed the expertise of the GCT company to come out and retune the engine. The specialist from Japan came, along with several engineers from MCFA, and within a couple of days, they were able to tune the engine to get what we wanted, which is very low NOx, very low CO, and something that would really be effective. The results were really good. The MCFA guy said that the emissions levels were eye-popping, I think he said. Really did well. I'll show you those right here. Here are the final tests. The way I show the NOx here is you can see there's a solid line of 125 PPM. That's that fork truck before we modified it on the same test course. How did the NOx do? Here it's almost zero.
It's three PPM or something like that on average. You've really knocked the NOx down by the retuning. On the other side of the slide, you see that we have a CO chart, and you get these familiar excursions that we get when you're letting off the gas and putting the gas, and you've got the CO bumps, but they're almost eliminated. All through here, all those bumps are eliminated by Ultera. This big one in the middle, some got by, but on the whole, you've reduced it by 90%, and that can be improved with a little more catalyst. You can sort of get whatever you want out of that. It's very effective. The whole result was we felt we've achieved what we wanted to do.
At this point, there's really no more testing on this test track because to certify, what you really have to prove yourself on is a dynamometer with a computer that's controlling the throttle to a similar herky-jerky type test, but it's really the computer. We said to MCFA, "You really are there, we think. You can probably get certified right now. Just put an engine on the dyno." What we decided to do was Lucy, maybe go to the next slide. In sessions with them, we said, "Let's move towards certification." MCFA began to schedule with Southwest Research, which is a certified laboratory for this type of stuff, and they were trying to get a May slot to do the initial part of the testing. PERC generously agreed to fund it.
The first set of tests we wanted to do was put the bare engine on the dyno and make sure the tuning was right to get the low NOx and everything else that we need to get the best out of it. Because it was a different cycle than the test, we felt that, and MCFA felt as well, they didn't want to go through all that pain and not have the tuning engineer on-hand to adjust the tuning as needed to get the best result they could. This was around March, is when this was going on, and COVID-19 upended the whole plan, like it's done for so many people in actually much worse ways. We're waiting for the travel restrictions to be lifted and hopefully we can get the program back on track.
The other vendor that we're working with, the other OEM, is recent, and this would be Origin Engines. They are a Nebraska-based manufacturer. We know them because we work with them. They supply our CHP engines, and we know them as innovative. They're fast-growing in the industrial market. Like us, they're aware of the growing value of low emissions to customers. We did get an agreement signed, and it's actually presented in Diesel Progress last month. I think the February edition would have it, you could find it there. It tells some of the things, mostly what I'm just going to say now.
The license covers the range of 80 to 280 horsepower, and we kept it at the 80 to avoid any conflict with MCFA, which is about 60 horsepower, I think. It uses various fuels, natural gas and propane included. More importantly, it covers quite a few markets, oil and gas, and so forth, forestry. Of course, fork trucks is one of the main markets they're interested in. Where are we going in the future? We want to get the MCFA program back on track. Who knew that it would go beyond the summer? It did, and those poor folks in Houston, they're still not out of the woods yet with their issues, but we hope to get it back on track as the vaccines take effect and the travel restrictions are lifted. The Origin agreement, I believe, will be very positive.
It's actually an agreement. It's a signed agreement, and it has a strong potential to expand Ultera. Origin's a terrific operation, they're able to address not just one company. They can go to all the companies that sell fork trucks, and they can produce some real commercialization, I think, pretty quickly. The agreement has a schedule that's aggressive for getting things going. I'm pretty confident that we are going to see a success soon. Now, I have one other thing I want to mention. Two years ago, when we were doing the gasoline development, we asked Southwest Research to do some work to look at catalysts. We're just using the same old catalyst for the second stage that we would use for the first stage . We had done no looking into that area.
They recognized that because we're operating in a lower temperature range, there's technology that would not survive in the high-temperature environment that will work very well, and better in fact, in the low-temperature environment than what we have. At the end of that initial phase that we funded, and I think it was a couple hundred thousand dollars, it was a significant program. The laboratory testing had shown this one particular catalyst that was made in miniature to have some pretty remarkable performance. We've decided internally we are going to fund that next step because it has the potential of either increasing the effectiveness of the catalyst and the size we have or alternatively, we could use smaller, less costly catalyst and so forth. I don't want to talk too much about it because we want to get a patent application filed before I do any talking about it.
That, I think, could really seal the deal for this technology to make it very robust and cost-effective. Final thoughts that I have before we get into the questions. In thinking about it over these months, what is the value of this technology? I think we really were focused on that California, really an outdoor air quality standard as being the holy grail. In reality, if you go elsewhere in the country, they may not care so much about the California outdoor air quality requirements. I think, I would emphasize, and I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I would emphasize the indoor air quality aspects of it, because it could really have universal appeal, not just California. Having this potential to attain low values for all the pollutants, which is unusual for this type of technology, would really benefit the industry, I think.
Lastly, I have further reading for nerds, if they're any out there. We published two SAE papers that deal mostly with the gasoline work that we did. The second one, but it does tell about the technology, and it's gratifying to have a peer-reviewed paper that accepts our technology and really adds credibility. The second paper actually was selected as a significant paper of the year, one of the significant papers of the year, and it's published in a separate group of papers, so it was really well-received. I think we have a lot of potential. I'm done, and I'm ready for questions if anybody would like to ask any, and let Matt come back into the discussion.
That's great, Bob. We really appreciate it. You're right about the indoor air quality restrictions, because there's only more and more focus on that aspect of things.
Yeah.
The beauty of propane-powered forklifts is that they do operate indoors and outdoors, but with the focus on indoor air quality, you're dead on. We're going to open it up to questions here. If anybody has any questions. I think Rachel may be asking the questions here. Rachel, do we have any questions we want to ask?
Yeah, Bob. First question here, has this technology ever been considered for the aftermarket, or is it only a solution through an OEM like MCFA?
Well, actually, we have that small business that I described where we will sell to the water district who's got a Caterpillar engine or to a person who has a standby Generac generator who wants to make it so they can run more than 200 hours a year in California for microgrids and so forth. We do that now. I think Origin may consider that. Why not? I think they have the right to do that. I'm not positive, but I think they do. Yes, the answer is it works well as a kit. There is one hitch, though. If you have a forklift that has been certified already, and say it was a different type of engine, a General Motors engine, and you were to add the kit, then that would invalidate the certification. That would be a problem.
That's why I think in the forklift market, you could do it, but you'd have to certify that engine combination separately. If you're gonna do a lot of them of one configuration, you could do that, but the certification part's difficult. Otherwise, a kit is not a bad way to go.
Okay, then talking efficiency, sorry, efficiency and durability of the InVerde e+ on propane, does it operate at 125 kW, or is it derated when on propane?
That's a good question. We don't think it's derated. In the past, we've never done InVerde on propane that I know of. We've done plenty of, not plenty, perhaps a handful of chillers and cogen machines on propane, and we never derated them. As far as I know, there was never a problem. I think we can get to the 125 KW, but I'd like to maybe try some testing first. Technically, it should be about the same exhaust temperatures that the valves see. The valve train is where the issue would be, and I don't know that'd be a problem.
Okay. Does fuel sulfur have an effect on the second stage catalyst now that it's seeing relatively lower temperatures?
It does. Interesting you ask that. In the cogeneration application, we've hundreds of these machines out there. There are certain parts of California, in Southern California, it's the only one we've run into this, where sulfur does appear. Sulfur is in natural gas as part of the odorant, and there may be some natural sulfur as well. For whatever reason, the sulfur did get into the catalyst, and the reaction, I presume, is SO2, maybe SO something. It normally goes right out the engine, you never see it again. When you're at those temperatures, you get a chemical reaction that would, I think, form, I'm guessing now, I don't really know, but I think it's sulfuric acid, perhaps, or something like that, and that would attack the catalyst.
However, we don't see it anywhere else, and there's a little bit of sulfur, but it doesn't seem to affect us. The longevity that we're shooting for in cogeneration is really different than you would probably see on any application. The engine's running 78,000 hours a year, and you're running wide open throttle practically all the time. It's a very severe duty cycle. I don't think you'd run across it in propane, and there are ways to deal with it. We have a patented, I believe we have a patented system. We developed with a catalyst manufacturer, a sulfur-resistant catalyst that instead of using aluminum oxide as the foundation inside the catalyst, it used another material, and it was resistant, and that seemed to get us by in California after that. Good question.
Is the catalyst more susceptible for sulfur poisoning?
If there is a lot of sulfur, it could have a problem. As I said, we have several hundred machines, more than that probably, on the East Coast never see the problem. We go to the West Coast, in Southern California, not Northern California, it's this SoCalGas thing, we found we did have a problem, but it was controllable by having the sulfur-resistant catalyst in place and also by changing the catalyst every two years as opposed to longer than that. That's where we ended up with that. We haven't introduced the sulfur-resistant catalyst on a widespread basis because it's somewhat more expensive, and we just don't seem to need it on the East Coast. Most places, I should say.
Okay. What's the cost adder for the Tecogen 125 KW unit?
For the emission system or f or the products?
Let's see here.
Well, I think what's being asked is how much does the Ultera system cost on the e+ machine. It's actually, I don't think we rarely, if ever, sell it. I don't know that we've ever sold it without it. If you look at the Ultera product, it's a cogeneration machine, so it already has the three-way catalyst, the first stage . It already has the heat exchanger because we're recovering the heat. All you're basically doing is adding a small air pump and the second catalyst. The cost is not that bad. I don't know what the price is. That's a different question. The price, I don't know what the price is. It's not a complicated device for cogeneration because you already have 3/4 of the cost is already on the machine because you're recovering the heat.
Okay.
I don't know if I addressed that properly, but I think that's what they were asking.
Yeah, I think you did, Bob. Thank you.
Yeah.
Would this application be to replace an existing forklift engine, or only on new OEM applications?
I think it's going to start off just being an OEM. You get the fork truck with that system built into it. The problem is, as I mentioned, if you were to upgrade, maybe there are parts of the country that this wouldn't be a problem, I don't know. If you have that certification on the engine and the catalyst system, they're all as a group certified together. The only way you could just add the system would be if that whole engine, catalyst, controller, everything had been already certified before as a separate group. In large number, that may work out, as I see it would be a problem because most of the engines out there may not be that particular one that you had certified. Maybe that's not true. That's the problem as I see it.
You've got to get a certified system out of it when you're done. If you just stuck the components onto an uncertified, making the original certification, losing that original certification, that would be a problem.
Okay, Bob, is there a targeted cost for a forklift application?
Of course. We've had discussions with our partners on that. I don't want to get ahead of them. They're going to set the price, and it's going to be not what it costs, but what they could sell it for. The two aren't necessarily related, but I don't want to speak for them. If you step back for a minute and look at what we're actually putting together in the system, it's a heat exchanger, which is like a little water heater, and you buy that device as a spare part. The one we used was from a, I don't know if it was a GM, but it was some sort of aftercooler for a diesel product engine, that you buy it as a spare part, and it didn't cost much.
If it was not a spare part that you were buying at the local spare parts store, I think it would be very inexpensive. You've got that, you've got a second catalyst, and then you've got some piping and so forth. There's nothing in there, catalyst is not that expensive. Well, precious metals are getting very expensive now. Those things are very ordinary mass-produced components that don't cost that much. There's nothing exotic in that group. It's metal, and cheap metal and copper and stuff like that. I feel confident that the price is, I mean, the cost is not going to be an obstacle, if it does what it says it does.
Bob, just to tack onto that a little bit. I think it's worth noting that there's no infrastructure change here on going with a propane lift that some extra cost and a system that gets you into a near zero emissions area where possibly a traditional forklift wouldn't get you into, I think is worth noting. Those are all good points.
Thank you. Yeah.
I am not seeing any other questions unless anybody has any last minute things they want to plug into the question box for Bob. One thing I did want to point out was that Origin Engines is actively looking at ways to use that Ultera system as a retrofit on forklifts without having to void those EPA certifications.
I did not know that. Thank you.
All right. Well, Bob, I appreciate your time today. I appreciate you being here. This was great. Rachel, do we have any last-minute questions or anything that we need to address?
Actually, yes. One other question that just came in. If I understand correctly, this could be a kit for retrofits.
I'm sorry, can you repeat that?
The question, this could be a kit for retrofits?
I think that it sounds like Origin is looking at that possibility, yes. They're trying to look at ways that could get around that certification problem, which I didn't really know. I talk to them a lot, but I just hadn't heard that they were looking into that. We did talk about it, but I thought a while back, but I didn't realize they were actually actively looking at it. That's great.
That came from a very trusted source, directly from Origin, just so that everyone is aware.
Yeah. Well, they're coming tomorrow. I'll talk to them tomorrow. They're coming to visit me. My first visitor since March.
That'll be great. No, the only thing I wanted to mention is that this webinar was recorded and will be going out to all registrants of the session in an email early next week. We appreciate your participation today and look forward to bringing you more webinars in the technology series.
Thank you, everyone.
Yep. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Bob. Thank you everyone who joined today, and as always we'll see you again next time. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you.
Bye-bye.