Cleaner Diesel

Using science to clean up diesel's legacy.

For over a century, the diesel engine has been more or less unstoppable. A soot-stained workhorse of global trade, transport and, we, er, um, civilization. It has powered variations of just about everything in this space from the ships that carry our goods to the tractors that feed our families. And it has done so with a a grim trade-off: reliability in exchange for a heavy environmental toll. But what if the secret to cleaning up this global fleet wasn’t going to cost billions? What if cleaning it up could be done with an oddly paradoxical addition to the fuel tank?

That’s today’s Good Thing. A look at a recent breakthrough (or two) in the world of transport. Perhaps it has taken too long, but we may now be at the crossroads of what was traditional combustion and the future of transport that is much cleaner and better than we could have imagined.