Incoming Caterpillar CEO has a green agenda

CHICAGO, Oct 26, 2009 (Chicago Tribune - McClatchy-Tribune News Service via COMTEX) -- CAT | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Douglas Oberhelman, named last week the incoming CEO of Caterpillar Inc., acknowledges it's hard for people to identify a company "famous for bulldozers" with an environmental agenda.

But in an interview and in a speech last week in Chicago, he said that's where the company, like his farm, is heading.

At his Peoria County, Ill., farm, Oberhelman says, he walks the talk.

He has added terraces, wetlands and wildlife around what once was a coal mine, and he trades corn and beans he raises on 250 acres with a neighbor who, in turn, supplies him manure from 1,500 dairy cows.

A Caterpillar engine helps to convert fumes from the manure into electricity, which, in turn, powers the farm he bought in 1997.

The company also is "doing things that might surprise you," 56-year-old Oberhelman said last Thursday at an event sponsored by the conservation group Ducks Unlimited.

Previously as president of the company's engine and services business, Oberhelman expanded Caterpillar's "remanufacturing" efforts in China, Singapore and India so that only 10 percent of old engine parts end up in a landfill. And the same engine Oberhelman uses to produce electricity on his farm is used by Waste Management, the trash company.

"They've joked with me about becoming a public utility," he said.

And rather than install 4,300-horsepower engines in diesel locomotives, Caterpillar now installs two: one at 3,500 horsepower and the other at 800 horsepower.

"I went on a 30-mile test run, and the more powerful engine only had to be used half the time," he said. "You don't need it on a downhill run. It's a very green solution for our customers."

During a Q&A session, Oberhelman's stepdaughter pressed him on why the company had no campaign touting its green products.

"I've been pushing the idea, like GE's 'ecomagination,' of what kind of brand, maybe that we can put on the side of a Caterpillar (hard) hat to show our environmental efforts," Oberhelman said. "We're going to get it done. I have a little more influence today than I did yesterday."

When asked what he most wanted government to do, he said it needed to ease regulations on alternative fuels and green technology. "It's a painful process to make happen," he said, later adding, "The process should be stimulative to getting alternatives to market much faster."

The son of a John Deere salesman, Oberhelman started with Caterpillar in 1975 as a treasury analyst. He frequently tells people how he loved to fish on the "exotic and junglelike" bank of the Paraguay River while working for Caterpillar in South America in the 1980s.

He married his wife, Diane, a divorced mother of four and a Peoria real estate executive, in 2000. He also had been previously married. When he brought Diane to see the Paraguay River, he said, it "looked nothing like it did before. The water was brown. ... It left a big impression."

Oberhelman isn't all green. Under his direction, Caterpillar left the North American truck engine business because of new, costly emission standards (although he says it was because the market for the product was shrinking). And he helped win enormous union concessions, including a much lower wage scale for new workers, after two strikes in the 1990s.

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