FORD beats GM to market with a ethanol powered engine with 15% BETTER fuel economy than on gas alone

[JohnWxy]

As I explained some time ago, higher octane ethanol enables turbocharging to get more power out of the same size engine. So you can reduce the size of the engine and reduce gasoline consumption.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/01/ford_to_introdu.html#more

Ford to Introduce New E85-Capable, Direct Injection, Turbocharged Engine Family
3 January 2007
With its debut of the Lincoln MKR concept car next week at the North American International Auto Show, Ford is launching its new TwinForce engine family—combining direct injection with turbocharging—in an E85-capable model.

The concept’s 3.5-liter gasoline twin-turbocharged direct-injection V-6 performs comparably to or better than V-8 engines, delivering 415 hp (310 kW) and 400 lb-ft (542 Nm) of torque on an E85 ethanol blend. The concept’s engine is mated to a six-speed transmission.

Achieving this type of performance from a V-8 would require an engine displacement of 6.0-liter or larger, nearly double the size of the 3.5-liter in the Lincoln MKR, according to Ford. As a result of the smaller V-6, the Lincoln MKR concept delivers 15% better fuel economy than a V-8 with similar performance.

(more)

ford is introducing this in an expensive car but it will be introduced into less expensive models in time.

What this means is, if you'd be satisfied with say, 200 horsepower in your family sedan you could achieve that with about a 2 liter engine with better mileage than you would get on an much larger engine running on gasoline only.

This of course, does not even approach what the MIT direct ethanol injection engine (which Ford is working with MIT engineers on) which will deliver 30% better fuel economy using an even smaller proportion of ethanol (5% to 95% gasoline).

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/10/startup_working.html

MIT scientists and engineers earlier this year founded a company—Ethanol Boosting Systems, LLC (EBS)—to commercialize their work on direct-injection ethanol boosting combined with aggressive turbocharging in a gasoline engine. (Earlier post.) The result is a gasoline engine with the fuel efficiency of current hybrids or turbodiesels—up to 30% better than a conventional gasoline engine—but at lower cost.

EBS has a collaborative R&D agreement with Ford, and anticipates engine tests in 2007 with subsequent licensing to Ford and other automakers. If all goes as expected, vehicles with the new engine could be on the road by 2011.

This means that if all the cars on the road were using the MIT direct ethanol injection engines then you would achieve a 30% reduction in total gasoline consumption using an amount of ethanol which would be only 5% of the total fuel supply.

And that's at a cost according to MIT estimates of $600 to $1,000 per car!

BTW, ethanol production should reach 5% of the total fuel supply in about 2 to 3 years.

[JohnWxy]

1. ETHANOL BOOSTING SYSTEMS, LLC (EBS)

http://www.ethanolboost.com

The carefully designed and timed direct injection of ethanol, through the mechanism of evaporative cooling and its own intrinsic properties as a fuel, is equivalent to increasing the overall fuel octane rating of the mixture of ethanol and gasoline to more than 130. This high effective octane rating and increased resistance to engine knock allows for significantly higher levels of turbocharging. This implies that -- compared to a conventional engine of comparable size -- over two times the air and fuel flow can be processed in an engine equipped with EBS technology without any reduction of compression ratio, an important design parameter affecting the engineís intrinsic energy conversion efficiency. This allows for substantially higher levels of torque in turbocharged engines and makes it possible to substitute a smaller, more fuel-efficient turbocharged engine for an engine twice its size while maintaining the same or better horsepower and torque capability in the low RPM range which is important for acceleration. For example, a 3.0 liter V6 engine could be replaced by a 1.5 liter 4 cylinder engine.

[NNadir]

2. Hey Johnny Boy! Did you read this month's Scientific American?

What? You don't read Scientific American? What a surprise.

You really should make an exception in this case.

There's an article in there that mentions all your friends, Drs. Pimentel and Wang.

You really should read it. You don't have to know much science at all to read Scientific American since they try to write it at a very basic level, so people can approach scientific subjects and have their appetites wet.

I have always loved that magazine since it can help people who would otherwise be clueless raise their level of scientific understanding. Regrettably, however, the people who know the least science are precisely the people who are not interested in learning science in the first place.

This explains why Scientific American is not as popular as say, People magazine.

They ask the question whether or not ethanol has any effect on climate change. Then they shrug. "Can't tell," they say, at Scientific American. They're sort of agnostic on the question of "Is ethanol worth it?"

They go on to talk about lots of stuff that doesn't matter to hand wavers, like say, lignins, but who cares? Ferment and be happy. They do say that cellulosic ethanol would be just wonderful, with the small caveat, "if it works..."

[Systematic Chaos]

3. Now that you mention it, is the EROEI on ethanol even 1.15?

If not, then what's the point since you have to use more than the 15% gain in fossil fuels to produce said ethanol, right?

:shrug:

[Dogmudgeon]

6. The EROEI of ethanol is controversial

Several years ago, David Pimentel and Tad Patzek (both of whom JohnWxy strongly dislikes) calculated it at around 0.8. I could be considered a "fan" of Pimentel, but I thought that was an unnecessarily pessimistic figure. I am concerned with the massive, long-term, and dangerous depletion of soil by factory farming, Pimentel's main area of work in the past 20 years. Several other scientists agreed that EROEI=0.8 was too pessimistic, and some of them strongly rebutted P&P, showing EROEIs of as high as 2.0. So now the ethanol industry is presenting an uncritically optimistic set of figures. They are also underplaying issues of soil depletion, the possible economic competition between food and fuel, and other side-effects, though giving them the benefit of the doubt, they are trying to raise money. (Yes, I'm being half-sarcastic about that. Or maybe, only half-sarcastic. It's getting difficult for me to tell even with my own wise-ass remarks!)

In spite of this, I do support ethanol development; however, I think that our main biofuel development should be with oil-rich alga, which not only spares farmland, but could also enhance it. Algae could also fix and produce large amounts of nitrogen compounds useful as fertilizer. But we've only just started to study how to actually implement algal biofuel production.

For primary energy generation, it's pretty much down to nuclear (preferably with recycling and breeder reactors) and deep geothermal. While we have plenty of technical experience with nuclear reactors, we still have little experience with deep geothermal power generation. And we simply need too much energy too fast to spend another 30 years developing suitable energy storage methods for wind and solar, or fusion reactors.

Overall, no matter what we do (and we're most likely to do nothing), we need to change the way we've arranged our cities, our energy and food production, our development philosophies and plans, and our lives. Simply switching from gas to ethanol, or from petrochemical primary energy to nuclear primary energy, will still leave us with a huge menu of problems to deal with. Rather than deal with each of them in piecemeal fashion, we should just admit that we have an enormous, complex situation and start dealing with it as a whole.

As it is, we're not even spending much R&D money, and most of the news that is posted in this form is from press releases. I don't object to anyone posting them -- I mind that most of these companies' efforts go nowhere beyond raising some seed money.

--p!

[4dsc]

7. The EROEI of ethanol is controversial??

Johnie is nothing more than a corporate hack for ethanol!


A lot has been written about the energy balance of grain ethanol. Clearly, to be renewable, the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) must be greater than 1.0. Pimentel at Cornell and Patzek at Berkley have argued that there is actually a net loss of energy when producing ethanol (as well as some other biofuels) (1). I do not share this view, although there is enough uncertainty in the data that there is a possibility that the EROI for grain ethanol is less than 1.0. However, in order to make my point, I am going to use the data from a 2002 USDA study by Shapouri et al. entitled "The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update"(2). To be certain, Shapouri is an advocate of grain ethanol. In his report, Shapouri argues that when a BTU credit is taken for co-products like animal feed, the EROI is 1.34. In other words, for 1 BTU of energy invested, the total BTU value out was 1.34 BTUs if co-products were included.

At this point, it is important to point out a bit of accounting sleight of hand utilized by Shapouri, as well as a number of others when calculating EROI for ethanol. Note that the actual energy inputs into the process according to him are 77,228 BTU per gallon of ethanol produced (using the higher heating value, or HHV). The BTU value given for a gallon of ethanol (HHV) was 83,961. Therefore, excluding co-product credits, the EROI would appear to be 83,961/77,228, or 1.09. He includes a co-product credit of 14,372 BTU, which should raise the overall value of the BTU products to (83,961 + 14,372), or 98,333 BTUs. This would imply an EROI of 98,333/77,228, or 1.27. However, Shapouri, like many ethanol advocates, performs a completely illegitimate accounting trick to exaggerate the EROI of ethanol. He uses the 14,372 co-product credit to reduce the energy input of 77,228 and assumes an energy input of just 62,856 BTUs/gallon. Since the co-products are not actually used as inputs in the process, this is invalid. But that is not the most serious issue. When he uses the co-product credit to offset the energy input, it should be removed from the product side. Shapouri includes it on both sides of the equation – reduce the inputs with the co-product credit, and increase the BTU output with the co-product credit.

Consider this analogy. I invest $100, and I get a return of $20 and another $40 worth of goods (co-product). What is my return on investment (ROI)? Most people would say that I got a total return of $60 on an investment of $100, for an ROI of 60%. If we utilize Shapouri-style accounting, we would use the $40 co-credit to offset our initial investment. We would then argue that we only invested $60 to get a return of $60, for an ROI of 100%. So, the answer to the question - "When does a $60 return on a $100 investment amount to a 100% return on investment?" – is "Whenever the USDA is doing the accounting."

To give another example of why this accounting practice is invalid, consider a case in which we invested 100 BTUs of energy, and got in return 100 BTUs of animal feed and 1 BTU of usable energy. What is the EROI? Using Shapouri-style accounting, the EROI is infinite, since the 100 BTUs of co-product completely offset our initial investment. We invested nothing, and got 1 BTU in return! Clearly this is not a valid way of accounting for our energy balance, but this practice is common in ethanol accounting.

So, we have an exaggerated EROI in the case of ethanol, but what’s the bottom line? Energy is being created, right? Isn’t that what we are after?

Yes, we are after energy creation (indirectly via capture of solar energy). However, the EROI must be very good, or the price we pay for this energy creation will be much too high. At present there is a federal subsidy on ethanol that amounts to $0.51/gallon. Let's consider what we are getting for the subsidy. A gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 BTUs (same HHV basis as ethanol). In the Shapouri paper, the net gain reported in producing a gallon of ethanol was 21,000 BTUs. This means that we have to produce 125,000/21,000, or 5.95 gallons of ethanol before we have generated the energy contained in 1 gallon of gasoline. Given a federal subsidy of $0.51 a gallon, we have spent 5.95*$0.51, or $3.03 subsidizing replacement of 1 gallon of gasoline! This amounts to $24.29 of federal subsidy for every million BTUs (MMBTU) of energy created. Contrast this with a natural gas price of $7.00 per MMBTU. That doesn't even factor in various state subsidies which push the overall subsidy up to over $4.00 per gallon of gasoline displaced. So, taxpayers pay this, but then they still have to buy the ethanol. Any way you slice it, this looks like a bad deal to me.

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/03/grain-derived-ethanol-emperors-new.html

[Dean Martin]

4. Yes, but....

When is someone going to release an ethanol or hybrid car that the lower income folks can afford?

[CRF450]

5. Good article

Someday I'd like to convert my 01 Trans Am to run on ethonal. While running nothing but 93 octane, I average around 23 or 24mpg and have gotten just over 30 on a interstate trip. And I'v read that turbocharging it would actaully increase fuel milage! Pretty good for a 5.7L 325hp v8 huh?

[hatrack]

8. One fundamental question here - where's the efficiency gain coming from?

Since this model uses a V6 instead of a V8, that would (I assume) make for a fairly substantial efficiency improvement thanks to weight reduction.

And while the turbocharging system certainly provides improved performance according to the stats given here, ethanol remains a fuel roughly 20% less energetic than gasoline - and feel free to correct me if that percentage is off.

[JohnWxy]

10. Higher compression engine operates at greater effficiency. Ethanol octane is 113 gas: 93 for high te

Ethanol octane is 113 gas: 93 for high test.

With turbo-charging or super charging you can operate at much higher compression. You get more power out of the same size engine. This allows you to use a smaller engine and thus reduce gasoline consumption.

Check out MIT's direct injection ethanol boosted engine. They are working with Ford (and others ) on getting this into production by 2011.

[CRF450]

11. But heres one problem

Many cars buyers are gonna want an engine with a good amount of low end torque, small displacement engines lose over the bigger engines in this department. In order for smaller engines to make similar power, they have to run at higher rpm's. This also applies to turbo'd engines, cause they dont make much boost in low rpm's unless the vehicle has a twin turbo setup.

[jpak]

9. Detroit should be building E85/biodiesel plug-in hybrids that get 70+ mpg

Fuel economy is central to the success of sustainable biofuel transport.

I really wish Detroit would NOT produce low-gas-mileage E85 SUV and light trucks - it's entirely the wrong road to take...