After Pittsburgh police noticed a Hummer (yep, a Hummer... what else?) sitting conspicuously close to a five-hundred gallon tank of gas at a golf course, the vehicle suddenly took off. Considering that the top speed of a Hummer is right around one-hundred miles per hour, we can safely say that the driver was giving it all he had in an attempt to get away. The high-speed chase ended as the Hummer smashed into a tree and rolled several times in a nearby parking lot. The eighteen-year-old-driver sustained leg injuries which required a hospital stay and will face charges after being deemed healthy.

Sixty-eight gallons of gasoline were said to be found missing from the tank by the golf course superintendent. To recap: this story is further proof that:

1. Hummers are very expensive to fill up.
2. Gas thefts are on the rise in the face of record-high fuel prices.

[Source: WPXI News]

The Kelley Blue Book seems to track nearly everything related to cars and transportation. We recently became aware that a new KBB survey indicated that consumers are changing their car-buying habits because of high fuel prices. Not every purchaser is choosing as efficient a vehicle as they could, to be sure. According to KBB's latest survey, new car buyers are spending less on non-essential activities, like going to the movies, eating out and even purchasing new homes, all because of those same high gas prices. This data seems to indicate that it's not just the automotive industry feeling the pain -- the entire economy is at the mercy of petroleum.

Only twenty-two percent of respondents indicate that high gas prices are not affecting their spending habits at all. One bit of good news is that carpooling and other alternative transportation methods are on the rise, which should result in some reduction of vehicle emissions. Still, the five-percent increase cited since October of last year indicates that the public still has a long way to go before carpooling or mass-transit becomes a serious option in our collective minds.

Penn State University has really been on a green roll these last few days, getting three stories featured on our site. One had to do with a novel way to extract hydrogen from water using nanotechnology and sunlight and the second had to do with using coal and papermaking waste to make a liquid fuel. This third story again has to do with coal-based liquid fuels. Instead of looking at paper mills as potential sources for products to add to coal, they are looking to existing fuel refineries. They believe that many different fuels, including jet fuel, gasoline substitutes and diesel substitutes, can be made from coal if you add the correct refinery by-products. Penn State researchers have been working on this idea for a while now, first focusing solely on jet fuel. But, they found that while making the jet fuel they also ended up with certain amounts of fuel oil, diesel fuel and gasoline as co-products.

The refinery by-products of coal tar, refinery solvent and decant oil are being mixed with coal in different fractions. Fuel-grade coke, which is a fuel used in the steel industry, has also been used. Penn State should be familiar with the steel industry being that Pennsylvania is known as the steel capital of the U.S. (and hence the Pittsburgh Steelers football team). No mention was made of the emissions of these various fuels, so we are not suggesting that these are green fuels in any way. In fact, they are almost assuredly not green in any way. None of that means that the fuels will not be used, of course. Hopefully, the nation and the world will be on to bigger and better things by then!

[Source: Penn State]

What if we could speed up the process of making petroleum for use in our automobiles? Even better: what if we could just produce all of the hydrocarbons we need when we need them? Would we then have "renewable petroleum"? That is what a company known as LS9 is working on. They are "coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum." How? It seems that they are genetically engineering bacteria such as E. coli to make hydrocarbon chains. These bacteria make "fatty acids" which are stripped of the acid, leaving "hydrocarbon that can be made into fuel." The crude oil can then be refined into any of the standard petroleum based fuels that we commonly use, meaning that no changes would be necessary to our vehicles or any other processes that we use to transport them etc. These fuels would be just like what we use now.

One question this brings up is the emissions of the fuel. Obviously, more research is required on the subject, but this could be carbon-neutral, like other biofuels. You may be reminded of a similar operation which we covered before from a group known as Amyris. The difference between the two is that LS9 is attempting to make crude oil while Amyris is attempting to produce fuels ready to be used. Is there something out there better than gasoline? Could the LS9 system be used to make that fuel too? Interesting times most certainly lie ahead in the biofuel market.

Completely unrelated: how long until GM releases their LS9 engine in the Corvette? At the rate they are going at now, not long... but what fuel will it run on?

Related:

• Amyris Biotechnologies working to create synthetic biofuels
• Check out this green fuel ... gasoline

[Source: Technology Review]

I'll admit that I was mildly surprised to read that Toyota was going to start offering flexible fuel vehicles for sale in Brazil soon. Well, let me clarify that: I was surprised to hear the Toyota was not already offering flexible fuel vehicles for sale in Brazil. There, that's better. As the article mentions, ethanol is much cheaper in Brazil than petroleum, and most consumers would not want to purchase a car that they would be forced to use gasoline in. As you are probably aware, Brazil has been pushing forward for a while now to do away with gasoline in general, replacing it with ethanol derived from locally grown sugar cane. Most vehicle manufacturers have been selling vehicles which are capable of running on the alcohol fuel, again as the article mentions, including Honda - arguably Toyota's chief rival from Japan. With 80 percent of all vehicles sold in Brazil flex-fuel compatible, this news should not be surprising to anyone, unless, like me, they assumed that Toyota had already been offering them!

Note the flag above. It says "Order and Progress" (translated into English). Any thoughts on whether the conversion to ethanol from petroleum is progress? I'll say "Yes", but qualify that by saying that it could progress even further if they were able to use a cellulosic process to get the alcohol. At least they're not using corn!

[Source: Detroit News]

The New York Times has a nice summary on a form of combustion all major automakers are actively pursuing, called HCCI, short for homogenous charge compression ignition. HCCI was discovered quite some time ago through investigation of so-called "run-on", the continued running of an engine after the ignition was switched off, common with engines of late 1970's vintage. Gasoline engines can be designed for very low emissions, while diesel engines deliver great fuel economy. To make gasoline engines more fuel efficient, and diesel engines cleaner, money needs to be spent on either advanced engine technologies or expensive after-treatment devices. HCCI, which promises low emissions and high efficiency, uses a premixed fuel and air mixture like a gasoline engine, but the mixture is ignited through compression, as in a diesel engine. According to Dr. Uwe Grebe from General Motors, every automaker is working on the HCCI combustion process, since it deals with mileage and emissions challenges inside the engine, which would make it a more cost effective solution.

[Source: The New York Times, free subscription required]

While posting in his blog about ways to increase fuel economy, der5er goes into considerable depth covering the offbeat tip of buying your gas in the morning instead of the afternoon. The theory goes that fuel is denser in cooler temperatures and that you get more fuel for your money if pump in the morning when the temp is low and the fuel is denser. der5er, suspicious of the tip, did some research and after considerable effort finally found Chris Lawson's calculations on the subject. It turns out that it might be possible save 45 cents per gallon of gas if stations stored their fuel above ground, which most don't, and you were filling a tank the size of a KC-10 refueling aircraft. Still sounds like something Jamie and Adam would have fun disproving on MythBusters.

[Source: der5er, chrislawson.com]

UPDATE: changes made

On the coat tails of the Mexican hybrid we reported on a few days ago, a group of seven mechanical engineering students of the Delhi College of Engineering claim to have invented India’s first gasoline-electric hybrid car. The car will make it to U.S shores, as it will participate in the annual green car festival organized by the North-East Sustainable Energy Association of the United States this coming May. The car is promoted as being affordable, and having near-zero emissions in urban driving conditions. A 200-Ah lead acid battery was combined with a 1.3 liter fuel tank (that’s 0.34 gallon!) to power an 18 HP 346 cc gasoline engine and a 3.5 HP, 3000 RPM permanent magnet DC motor. It seems the user is able to select operating their car on the gasoline engine or the electric motor. If you ask me, it would probably be more efficient if some sort of electronic control unit did the decision making. It’s also interesting to see an 18 HP engine described as “powerful”.

[Source: The Hindu]

A group of MIT professors have invented a new type of ethanol-boosted, turbocharged, gasoline engine that promises to be almost as efficient as a gas-electric hybrid, but at a much lower cost. The main idea behind the concept is to reduce fuel consumption by reducing engine size, adding turbo charging, and increasing the engine compression ratio. I’m sure many of you are thinking this doesn’t sound like anything you haven’t heard before, and I would have to agree with you so far.

The novelty of the idea comes in the form of a separate injection of ethanol to avoid combustion knock. Combustion knock happens when gasoline spontaneously combusts, as opposed to the combustion initiated by the spark plug, and can cause significant engine damage. This spontaneous combustion happens most frequently when the engine is operating at a high output or running at high speeds. Turbo charging and increased compression ratios increase engine efficiency, but also contribute to increased risk of engine knock. In addition, when the engine is downsized substantially, it will be operating at high output and at higher engine speeds more frequently, again increasing the changes of engine knock. To avoid engine knock, the MIT professors propose to inject small quantities of ethanol into the combustion chamber when the engine is operating at conditions that are prone to knocking. An increase in fuel consumption of 30% is predicted. The main problem would be related to logistics, since consumers would have to fill up an ethanol tank, but the interval might be as infrequent as an oil change.

[Source: The Technology Review]