Filed under: Diesel, Emerging Technologies
O2Diesel gets funds to test ethanol-diesel blend
Diesel fuel gets its own "tag" here on AutoblogGreen because it can be a quite clean-burning fuel (as for tags, just look to the right of these entries and you'll see a list of topics, like diesel or hydrogen, click on one of them to call up all posts that relate to that topic. Neat, huh? OK, back to the post). But diesel is not perfect, and lots of groups are developing ways to make diesel live up to its low-emission promise. One such group is O2Diesel Corporation, which has developed an ethanol-diesel fuel blend and recently announced they have received $1 million in funds from the U.S. Department of Energy to test the O2Diesel fuel product under the California Air Resources Board (CARB) Diesel Emissions Control Strategy (DECS). The company says that O2Diesel "is already verified by CARB as an "alternative fuel" however DECS provides a higher level verification that enables companies in California industries such as construction/off road, port, transit, utilities, public fleets, and solid waste haulers as well as DoD facilities to meet both CARB and EPA air quality regulations." O2Diesel is a blend of 7.7vol% renewable ethanol, 0.6% of the company's patented and proprietary fuel technology and 91.7% of regular diesel fuel. Does that make it EB7.7?[Source: O2Diesel]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mulad 12:52PM (8/10/2006)
This formulation is mostly a technique to reduce emissions, right? Ethanol has been used in diesels before: E95 (95% ethanol) is an option, but the energy content is so low compared to diesel and biodiesel that it hasn't caught on. From what I've been able to find, you lose 40-50% fuel economy on that. Obviously the hit is much smaller--probably almost negligible--for this new blend, but I'm hesitant to believe that it's a good idea for diesel and ethanol to mix...
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BizzleNJ 2:34PM (8/10/2006)
Sounds nice, but as always you have to ask...is the total emissions involved in creating that 7.7% of ethanol really going to be less than if you had just used diesel instead?
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