By Bob Difley
How would you like to pull into a filling station and have a choice of different fuels, all of which you can use efficiently in your existing gasoline engine. That’s the ‘Holy Grail of Energy Security,’ says Don Hillebrand, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s* Center for Transportation Research. “An engine that can run on whatever is available has several major security advantages.”
With today’s strangle-hold on fuel by the oil industry, your options are gasoline, gasoline, or gasoline. If you want to use another fuel, your choices include diesel, also a petroleum based fuel for which you need an entirely different engine, or electric—also requiring a different motor/engine configuration—and which has yet to become part of mainstream transportation.
The spark-ignition engine being developed by Argonne’s “omnivorous engine project” would run on a variety of liquid fuels, such as gasoline, ethanol and butanol. Butanol is an organic alcohol that can be fermented from biomass or made entirely with solar energy from algae. It has an octane rating closer to that of gasoline than ethanol, which is also an alcohol fuel. Vehicles able to run on straight gasoline or 10% ethanol will run on butanol. Butanol tolerates water contamination better and is less corrosive than ethanol and more suitable for distribution through existing pipelines used for gasoline. These factors piqued the interest of both DuPont and BP that formed a joint venture to bring butanol, currently more expensive to produce than ethanol, to market at competing prices.
But the ability to get the engine to run on any of the three fuels—or any combination of the three—is the breakthrough needed to make it work, a process that involves adjusting the spark timing and fuel injection automatically based on the blend. Tom Wallner, an Austrian PhD engineer working on the project, admits, “It’s more on the controls than it is on the hardware. The engine must determine what fuel it is, then tune itself to run efficiently on that fuel.”
Your choice, as you stand with pump handle in hand gazing at the multi-fuel selection, would be whatever fuel is cheapest at the time, effectively unlocking petroleum’s handcuffs on fuel pricing, while causing different fuels to compete with each other on the street. But that’s not all. A nation’s economy that is held captive by foreign suppliers is a major national security risk, as has been demonstrated by OPEC, terrorist threats, and hostile governments.
Could we thereby reduce our need for foreign oil, if not completely, at least from unstable or hostile countries? And wouldn’t this also reduce the stress of an unstable, roller-coaster fuels market, enabling additional domestic alternative fuels to be developed without our backs to the wall trying to pump yet more oil?
*The government established Argonne National Laboratory, 30 miles southwest of Chicago’s Loop, after WWII as the country’s first national laboratory. The lab, funded by the Department of Energy, does research into nuclear energy, as well as basic scientific inquiries, and operates several user facilities for the benefit of scientists from all over the country.