Cummins Confidential : "Fabulous" Year, Everybody Raise Their Gasses For Cummins

Cummins has discovered a new miracle – the word “fabulous”. Fabulous engine. Fabulous year. Fabulous quotes from customers. Fabulous way to avoid saying the quiet part out loud: it is still a fossil-fuel truck engine, running on methane from a leaky system, sold by the same company that just paid the largest Clean Air Act penalty in history for cheating on emissions. Unless “fabulous” is now just an adjective for engines that survive a year without incurring a fine.

They have not found religion. They have found another revenue stream and a new green costume to wear while they milk it.

Fabulous For Whom

Strip the confetti off the press release and look at what they are actually bragging about.

The X15N is a 15-litre natural gas truck engine with up to 500 hp and 1,850 lb-ft of torque. It is specced as “diesel-like performance” that meets upcoming 2027 EPA and CARB standards and can do 750 miles on a fill in the right spec.

UPS, Wegmans and Kleysen get rolled out as test-bed saints in NACFE’s “Run on Less – Messy Middle” demo – mountain grades, heavy doubles, Alberta winters. Drivers say it pulls like diesel, starts in the cold, and makes less noise. NACFE calls it promising.

All of that can be true. None of it answers the only question that matters for the climate part of this sales pitch: does this actually cut total greenhouse emissions, or just move them around and rebrand them?

“Near-Zero Emissions” – At The Tailpipe Only

The article leans hard on “near-zero emissions”, especially when the truck is fed renewable natural gas (RNG). On paper, in the narrowest possible frame (tailpipe NOx and PM), fine – modern natural gas engines can meet very tight local pollutant limits.

But the climate story is not a tailpipe. It is a value chain. Natural gas is mostly methane, and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ in the near term. If too much of it leaks anywhere between the well, the pipeline, the compressor, the station and the engine (or slips through the engine unburned), your “near-zero” turns into “actually worse than diesel” very quickly.

EDF-linked work on heavy-duty gas trucks has been saying the same thing for a decade: unless methane leakage is aggressively controlled, swapping diesel for natural gas can worsen and accelerate climate damage rather than reduce it.

Cummins knows how to talk about air quality in Salt Lake City and NOx standards. What they do not talk about here is:

upstream leaks from gas production and transport
methane slip from engines and fueling
the full well-to-wheel carbon footprint compared against the latest diesel

Instead you get hand-waving about “lowest carbon intensity fuel” and a lot of anecdotes about drivers liking the truck. Lovely for drivers, useless for climate truth.

RNG – Magic Unicorn Fuel With Tiny Real Supply

The PR keeps pushing renewable natural gas as the ace card. RNG from landfills, manure, waste streams – in the best cases it really can be low- or even net-negative on carbon intensity under certain accounting regimes. That is true for the molecules you actually have.

But there is a brutal scale problem that never appears in pieces like this:

RNG is a tiny fraction of total gas supply.
The best, lowest-carbon projects are limited and already chased hard by whoever can pay most.
Every truck Cummins sells with a “RNG-ready” halo still relies on the same gas infrastructure humans are currently failing to keep tight enough.

So when they say “near-zero with RNG”, what they really mean is: if you can get genuine low-carbon RNG instead of fossil gas, if the leaks are controlled across the chain, and if the accounting rules keep calling it negative – then the equation looks good on paper.

Those “ifs” are big enough to drive a Class 8 through.

The Messy Middle They Forgot To Mention

NACFE’s whole “Messy Middle” branding is actually honest – this is a transition period where lots of imperfect options jostle: diesel, HVO/renewable diesel, batteries, hydrogen, gas. Their job is to measure what trucks actually do in the real world.

Cummins turns that into a neat little fairy tale:

three fleets
some challenging routes
quotes about “my favourite truck” and “near-zero”
a bow on top

What you do not see:

hard comparative data vs the best available modern diesel on total cost and full emissions
any mention of the methane problem the scientific community keeps yelling about
any honest admission that this is, at best, a stop-gap that still locks in gas infrastructure for decades

The “messy middle” is messy because there is no free lunch. Natural gas solves some local issues, may help on CO₂ in narrow cases, and creates a methane headache everywhere else. Cummins simply edits the mess out of the story and calls what is left “fabulous”.

Same Company, New Green Costume

This is the part where the blood really starts to simmer.

You are not reading a press note from some plucky new entrant. You are reading climate marketing from a company that just agreed to pay around $1.675 billion for installing emissions defeat devices on hundreds of thousands of Ram diesel trucks – the largest civil penalty for a Clean Air Act case in US history.

They lied about clean diesel, got caught, and wrote cheques big enough to make regulators go away without a courtroom brawl. Now they are back with “near-zero” natural gas, “renewable” magic, and a whole new set of claims they expect you to swallow without asking what could be hiding behind the brochure this time.

If you had that history, you might want to be a bit humble about your latest “gamechanger”. Cummins is not. They are already talking like they have cracked the code for the industry, again.

Fabulous For Fleets, Not For The Planet

Here is the honest version, the one Cummins will never write.

For fleets like UPS, Wegmans, Kleysen and waste haulers, X15N may well be a practical tool today:

diesel-like pull and range
lower local pollutants where air is already filthy
fuel price and incentive structures that can make the numbers work, especially with RNG credits

If you are running a big fleet right now, trying to hit corporate carbon targets while the truly zero-emission options are still constrained, you will absolutely look at this kit. It is rational. It may reduce local harm. It may, depending on the gas you are getting, even lower your reported CO₂.

But that is not the same thing as “climate solution”. And it is miles away from the fairy-tale simplicity of “near-zero, fabulous year, job done”.

What This Really Is

Underneath all the green frosting, the X15N story is simple:

Cummins found a way to keep selling big combustion engines in a world that keeps talking about getting rid of combustion.
They are using natural gas, RNG branding and selective facts to pitch it as a climate win.
Independent science says the methane risk can erase or reverse those benefits if we do not get leakage under tight control across the chain.
The company making these claims has a fresh, proven track record of playing games with emissions when it suited them.

So yes – fabulous year for Cummins. Fabulous headline. Fabulous brochure quotes.
For the rest of us, it is still a big metal box that burns gas from a leaky system we cannot currently trust, sold as a climate solution by people who already poisoned the air once and cashed out.

That is not “near-zero”. That is same old gas, new badge.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Cummins Confidential : “Fabulous” Year, Everybody Raise Their Gasses For Cummins