Driving Lessons

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Can biofuels cure our gasoline ills?

One of the new films in theatres that’s generating a buzz is a documentary by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore that details the threat of global warming.
At the same time, there seems to be little hope that gas prices will ever truly come down from their high perch.

“The price of gasoline is a very interesting question,” says Frank Atkins, PhD, associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary (Calgary, AB). “I would be willing to bet that $1 per litre gasoline is probably here to stay. We’re not going to deviate far from it on the downside.”
Atkins says things are tight, and will likely only get tighter.

“The major problem that we have in gasoline prices . . . is that we haven’t built any new refineries in years. So we can’t make much more gasoline than we make now, and demand keeps going up,” he says.
While we may not want to acknowledge that high gas prices are inevitable, our increasing demand for fuel is driving biofuels research.

Research Initiatives
Auto21 (Windsor, ON), a Network of Centres of Excellence, currently supports nine projects within its Powertrains, Fuels and Emissions theme that are investigating both short-term and long-term approaches to reducing environmental and energy impacts of transportation, says theme co-ordinator Lisa Graham.
Several projects focus specifically on biofuels and natural gas, falling into the short-term category.
One such endeavour pairs researchers from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC) with Westport Innovations Inc. (Vancouver, BC) to examine the use of natural gas in place of diesel in heavy-duty trucks.

“They’re looking at being able to set up a diesel-like engine that takes advantage of the properties of the fuel, so they get very high efficiencies and very low emissions,” Graham explains.
Auto21 also has two projects being led out of the University of Toronto (Toronto, ON) that are looking at different aspects of biodiesel fuel.

“One is looking at the physical properties of fuels and how they get sprayed into the engine, so that you can take advantage of the different fuel properties of the biodiesel . . . how can you change fuel injectors or fuel pumps to take advantage of the fuel properties to get lower emissions,” she says.

“The other project is looking at the chemistry of different types of biodiesel that you might get from different oil seeds, to animal-fat derived, to recycled vegetable oil . . . and how changes in the chemistry of those different sources of fuels affect the emissions.”
Because Auto21 requires participants to have industry partners, some of these projects are already putting their results to use in the commercial field, and all have hopes of commercialization.

Food and Fuel
Taking their place alongside university-based research, several companies — including Dynamotive Energy Systems Corp. (Vancouver, BC), Commercial Alcohols Inc. (Toronto, ON), and Iogen Corp. (Ottawa, ON) — are currently investigating and working with ethanol and biodiesel in hopes of providing Canada’s answer to this growing problem.

While conventional ethanol is made from grain-based sources such as wheat and corn, Iogen produces cellulose ethanol, which is made from the non-food portion of these renewable feedstocks.
Tania Glithero, marketing and communications co-ordinator at Iogen says the company’s decision to work with cellulose ethanol traces back to its inception.

Iogen was founded in the 1970s by Patrick Foody Sr., who was originally interested in using woodchips to address the food shortage crisis.
“It was always Mr. Foody’s intention to alleviate pressure on food supply problems, alleviate pressure on fuel demands, and he wanted to do that in a sustainable way,” Glithero says.
Foody developed a steam explosion process that would harness the minerals and nutrients from the woodchips, which could then be used to feed cattle, leaving traditional cattle feed available for human consumption.

Though the system worked fairly well, Glithero says it was not considered an overriding success because the resulting beef wasn’t very palatable.
Around the same time, Foody was put in contact with a professor who was teaching about a particular micro-
organism that turns cellulose into ethanol.
The two paired up, and the company that would later become Iogen was formed. Initially focusing on renewable fuels options, the company ended up moving into the different industrial uses for enzymes when the oil crisis did not pan out in the 1980s.

The renewable fuels research has come off the shelf in recent years, however, thanks to growing concerns surrounding environmental issues and the price of gasoline.
Iogen does not produce cellulose ethanol for commercial sale, but rather runs its plant as a demo facility.
“What we’re gaining from the demo plant is the learning,” Glithero says. “It’s a large-scale research and development system.”

The company currently has a contract with an independent company, which in turn has a contract to supply Natural Resources Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada with E85, a fuel blend that is 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent gasoline and is used to fuel the government’s flexible-fuel vehicle fleet.

Upping the Ante
All of this hard R&D work is exactly why Iogen welcomes the federal government’s recent announcement that gasoline and diesel must contain five per cent ethanol by 2010. It’s a move that many are applauding, but that others say is quite ambitious.

“It represents a really large increase on the ethanol side,” Glithero acknowledges.
She says that while Canada is currently producing approximately 300 million litres of ethanol a year, the new five per cent mandate would require a production of approximately two billion litres. This jump seems even bigger when one considers that Canada is already not producing as much ethanol as it is consuming — approximately 600 million litres — Glithero says.

“If you look at jumping from a 300-million litre to a two-billion litre industry in the span of only four years, it’s a very, very large jump,” she says.
Despite the huge increase in production, Glithero says it is a manageable feat.
“It’s completely feasible,” she says. “The challenge is, of course, not just because it’s an ethanol industry, but just a new industry . . . that to get something off the ground and running, is very risky and very challenging.”

Peter Frise, PhD, scientific director and CEO of Auto21, agrees that integrating alternative fuels into the mainstream, and getting the industry up and running is the true challenge at hand.
“There’s a big infrastructure problem, and this is one of the difficult things about any kind of transportation fuel,” Frise says. “Just because we can make it work in the lab, doesn’t mean you can use it on the road. I mean, if there’s nowhere to buy it, then there’s no point in producing cars that use it.

“On the other hand, if there are no cars that use it, then there’s no point in producing the fuel itself. It’s sort of a chicken-egg thing, and it’s very, very hard to break that cycle because the scale of investment needed to do it is gigantic.”
Despite this roadblock, Frise says times have changed enough to warrant a move in the direction of alternative fuels.
“Now that petroleum fuel has literally tripled in cost in the last few years, there’s lots of impetus,” he says. “That’s what’s driving this.”

Just as economic reasons lie behind the recent drive into biofuels research, so do environmental concerns.
Biofuels boast fewer environmental costs than their non-renewable counterparts. According to U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center, 100 per cent biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by more than 75 per cent compared to petroleum diesel, and a blend of 20 per cent biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 15 per cent.
Frise says that not only do alternative fuels have a direct environmental benefit with reduced emissions, but they also carry indirect benefits.
“When you drill for oil and then produce gasoline from it, there’s an environmental cost to that, because the process of refining itself creates emissions,” Frise explains.

Though biofuels also carry the environmental costs associated with farming the materials, such as fuel in tractors, Frise says the costs are still lower compared to petroleum.
“Some of the biofuels can be made from materials (that) are byproducts of other farming operations. So you’re going to get stuck with those materials anyway,” he says. “Since we’ve already used the fuel to grow the food, there’s no additional cost environmentally.”

With the high environmental costs associated with traditional fuels, Frise says biofuels are definitely a step in the right direction.
“There’s always, in any kind of energy, an environmental effect of producing the energy, and then there’s a use effect,” he says. “In biofuels, under many circumstances, it’s possible to have a much lower production effect and a much lower use effect. So there’s no downside to using this stuff.”