Short version – Cummins has taken everything it has ever done wrong and drawn it as a circle. They call it a “formula”. I call it an operating manual for turning diesel into money, and lungs into collateral damage.
The Diagram You Show God When You’re Explaining Why The Planet’s On Fire
International Mining runs this thing like a case study in genius. “The Cummins Formula: Optimizing Power & Efficiency for Mining Engines.” Big title. Big line drawings. Big four-quadrant graphic:
- Combustion efficiency
- Air handling
- Fuel system
- Thermal management
It looks less like engineering and more like the tattoo you’d get if you wanted to dedicate your chest to “I have learned nothing from the climate crisis”. There is no quadrant for “does not poison the atmosphere”, no arrow marked “stop burning shit buried in the ground”. Just a perpetual motion loop of “make it burn better so we can burn more”.
They brag that this “formula” has been refined over years of “ground-breaking” engine programmes. Of course it has. If you spend a century optimising how to set things on fire, you end up with a pretty picture. You also end up with regulators kicking your door in over defeat devices and a record Clean Air Act penalty north of $1.6 billion.
Funny how that enforcement notice never makes it into the quadrant.
Collaboration, But Only On The Bits That Keep Diesel Holy
Cummins insists this isn’t a secret sauce, it is a “collaborative process” with mining customers. On-site visits, active listening, openness, integrity, transparency – the usual corporate incense.
Read between the lines. Collaboration here means:
- Sit down with operators who have billions sunk into diesel fleets.
- Design engines that let them swear they are being “more efficient” while changing nothing structural.
- Wrap it in language about partnership so everyone can pretend this isn’t just another twenty-year maintenance contract with extra steps.
Show me the mine boss who walks into that meeting and says “I want out of diesel entirely” and walks out with anything Cummins makes. This “formula” is not a menu. It is a funnel. At the bottom is a hot block of metal and a fuel budget.
Iterative Optimisation = Iterative Externalisation
Step 3 in their sacred flow is “Iterative Optimisation” – test, tweak, refine, repeat. In a lab, that is good engineering. In a pit, it is something else:
- Iterate until the engine just scrapes under the regulatory bar, then ship.
- Iterate again after the next standard arrives, nudge the maps, call it a new model year.
- Iterate away any awkward questions about what happens when after-treatment fails in the real world and nobody has time to fix it.
They boast that they have pushed life expectancy on the QSK19 from 12,000 to 18,000 hours with “extensive durability testing” on a customer project.
Read that again in human units. Eighteen thousand hours of underground haul trucks and loaders coughing combustion products into spaces where ventilation is a rumour. Eighteen thousand hours of a machine that has already been at the centre of “look how reliable we are” marketing.
If you are downwind, those extra six thousand hours are not “value”. They are a sentence.
The Ghost Quadrant: Crimes We Don’t Talk About
What haunts the whole piece is what it refuses to say.
No mention of:
- defeat devices on Ram diesels, the DOJ, the EPA, the settlements, the recall of around 600,000 trucks.
- violation trackers that read like rap sheets – repeated environmental and safety fines tallied up like loyalty points.
- the basic physics that you cannot engineer your way out of the carbon budget with “better combustion”.
Instead, the article sits there smiling, talking about “lasting value” and “peak performance” like a serial arsonist giving a TED talk on candle design.
If Cummins ever redrew that four-slice circle honestly, the missing quadrant would be labelled “Shit We Hope You’ve Forgotten”.
Never Rest, Never Reflect
They roll out the “Never Rest” mantra – continuous improvement, 100-year legacy, always evolving. It sounds noble until you overlay it with the last decade of enforcement and PR.
Never resting has looked like:
- Always pushing the envelope of what regulators will tolerate.
- Always assuming that if you are caught, you can write one very large cheque and describe it as “moving forward”.
- Always telling customers that this time the technology really is clean, promise, trust us, look at the slideshow.
“Never Rest” is not a mindset. It is a survival strategy for a company that cannot afford to sit quietly or people might start asking why these engines exist at all in a world that already has the data on respiratory disease and climate damage.
The Real Equation Written In The Pit Wall
Cummins wants you to believe its formula looks like this:
Displacement + clever airflow + better injectors = more tonnes per litre, everyone wins.
The actual equation is uglier.
Diesel burned × engine hours × mine lifetime
= profit for operators and Cummins
– health for workers and communities
– a slice of whatever stable climate we had left.
Then you subtract the discounted cost of fines and call the remainder “shareholder value”.
That is what the quadrants are really optimising: how much damage you can export to the atmosphere, and how much of the bill you can leave to someone else.
Engines As Fossil Relics, Pretending To Be The Future
There is something almost religious about the way Cummins talks about engine “architecture” – configuration, bore, stroke, peak cylinder pressure – as if V-blocks and turbo housings are scripture.
The article frames the final architecture as an “ideal starting point” for a “new engine platform” that will last “multiple decades”. Multiple decades. In 2025. For new mining diesels.
On a long enough timescale, every single one of these engines is a physical fossil of our refusal to change. A piece of metal archaeology future kids will dig up and ask:
“They knew all this, and they still built it?”
And the only honest answer will be: yes. Because we let companies like Cummins dress up the same old combustion habit as optimisation, and call it progress as long as the graphs pointed in the right directions for fuel per tonne.
The Formula Isn’t Wrong. The Question Is.
On its own terms, the engineering probably works. The maths will check out. The CFD models will converge. The prototypes will hit their power curves on the dyno. All of that is almost beside the point.
The problem is not that Cummins has a formula. The problem is that the question they are answering is still:
“How do we keep running giant diesel engines in mines for as long as possible while sounding responsible?”
You change the question, the whole circle collapses.
Ask instead:
“How do we design mining so it needs fewer engines, less energy, and gets off diesel altogether?”
There is no quadrant for that. Not in this brochure. Not in this culture. Not yet.
Until there is, every new “optimised” mining engine from Cummins is just another spin of the wheel in a casino where the house always wins, and the rest of us pay out in asthma, heatwaves and the quiet knowledge that we saw the diagram coming and kept digging anyway.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project