High-Octane Solutions to the New Energy Crisis
by C. Boyden Gray (Boyden Gray & Associates/Real Clear Politics) … Currently, the EPA regulates fuels and automobiles separately, instead of as a single system. Automakers have the technological know-how to make much more efficient car engines, but regulatory barriers prevent them from doing so because they do not permit the use of cleaner fuels that would reduce carbon emissions and enhance performance.
The Next Generation Fuels Act – a bipartisan bill sponsored by Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois – would eliminate these barriers and bring American fuel policy into the 21st century. It works by raising minimum octane ratings – which Mercedes-Benz has noted is “the single most important property of gasoline when determining engine design” – to levels that both automakers and fuel manufacturers agree are technologically and economically feasible.
High-octane fuel works like this: The higher the compression ratio in an engine’s cylinders, the greater its fuel efficiency. But you can’t increase the compression ratio indefinitely – at some point, the heat created by pressurization alone will prematurely ignite the fuel and air mix, a phenomenon known as “knock.” Knock limits efficiency and damages the engine. A fuel’s octane rating is the measure of how much a fuel can be compressed before knocking.
Automakers and researchers have long known that using higher-octane fuels would improve fuel efficiency in existing cars and would enable automakers to make new cars even more efficient. Indeed, American automakers already sell these more efficient, high-octane vehicles in Europe.
The Next Generation Fuels Act also requires tomorrow’s gasoline to be cleaner. Unlike traditional high-octane blends, which rely on toxic, high-polluting, and carbon-intensive aromatic chemicals like benzene to increase octane, the blends authorized by the Next Generation Fuels Act must meet stringent life-cycle limits on carbon emissions.
The bill enables this by authorizing the use of higher blends of ethanol, the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest carbon source of octane. New research from the University of Illinois at Chicago has shown that the carbon reductions attainable with high-octane ethanol blends would at least equal those that the EPA has said can be achieved through its plans for forced electrification.
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Even with sales of electric vehicles doubling in 2021, they still accounted for less than 4% of new vehicles sold and 1% of vehicles on the road. Raising octane levels would improve the efficiency of the other 99% of existing cars immediately, sometimes by as much as 5%. The benefits for new cars would be even greater, as much as a 10% fuel efficiency improvement.
And because ethanol is typically less expensive than both gasoline and aromatic additives, increased use of ethanol will also lower the price you pay at the pump per gallon. Indeed, widespread use of low-level blends of ethanol as an aromatic replacement has saved American drivers on average 68 cents per gallon of gasoline over the last decade. READ MORE
Iowa biofuel is ready to meet the needs of American consumers (The Messenger)
