Fill 'er up. But with what?
In the fevered search for the fuel of tomorrow, a team of mit scientists has a surprising solution that just might be the most realistic one of all.
About two years ago, Leslie Bromberg began retreating to his basement in Sharon every night to sit at his computer and analyze data, to try to determine if he and two colleagues at MIT had found a way to help save the world. Bromberg, 56, and fellow scientists Dan Cohn and John Heywood believed they had an idea that could revolutionize the way we drive, making cars as much as 25 percent more fuel-efficient than they are now. And they thought this could be done with a relatively simple adjustment to the old-fashioned gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine. The key: a squirt of ethanol. But first they needed numbers. They needed proof.
Down in his basement, Bromberg set out to find it. He assembled a computer model to mimic a car engine. He tinkered with code for months so it could predict behavior under various circumstances. “And then,” he says, “I let the code go.” The men knew what they were doing. Bromberg, Cohn, and Heywood are considered giants in their field. By the summer of 2005, the data proved their theory correct: By injecting ethanol directly into the cylinders of a car, they could not only improve fuel efficiency but also reduce emissions. All they needed, they figured, was a separate, smaller tank for ethanol, which would have to be filled only once every couple of months. This could be done on the cheap. The type of engine required would be just $1,300 more expensive to build than a typical engine, the scientists estimated, and three to five times less than what it takes to build a hybrid engine. And with the help of a supportive automaker, this could be manufactured for new cars right now. The ethanol-boosted engine, as it came to be known, wasn’t like the ethanol-powered cars already getting so much attention. It would run on the fuel Americans already know: gasoline. And it didn’t require new technology, merely a different use of existing technologies. This was what pleased the MIT scientists the most. Their idea – though not sexy – was today, not tomorrow. It wasn’t futuristic, but it was real. What if your car got 40 miles to the gallon instead of, say, 32? Those $30, $40, or $50 fill-ups would come a lot less often. Now what if everyone could do that? Gasoline consumption for US motors could fall from 384.7 million gallons a day to 288.5 million. That would be 35.1 billion gallons saved annually – roughly enough to fuel Germany, Russia, Mexico, and the United Kingdom for an entire year.
“This has really enormous potential,” says David Cole, the chairman of the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “This is a big deal. It’s not a sure thing; nothing ever is until it’s executed. But when you’ve got guys of this capability, it’s different than some guy coming in off the street and saying he had a dream during the night about some new technology. This is potentially very special.”
These are bewildering times for the auto industry. With public pressure mounting to reduce our dependence on oil and many people increasingly concerned about climate change, carmakers are scrambling to find the eco-friendly yet still affordable gas-alternative Car of the Future. There are a slew of ideas out there: hybrids, plug-in hybrids, clean-diesel cars, cars powered mostly or entirely by ethanol, and cars that run on hydrogen, the ultimate green technology.
As confusing as all these ideas can be to consumers, the hype behind each is even more so – ethanol included. Depending on who’s talking, each of these technologies is the best or the worst idea ever conceived. Hybrids will save the world! (Only about 1.5 percent of US cars sold last year were hybrids.) Plug-in hybrids are the answer! (The estimated cost of a plug-in hybrid battery is $17,500.) Cleaner diesel cars will hit the market next year! (Americans historically don’t like diesel.) The future is ethanol! (It gets less mileage than gasoline, and we can’t yet produce enough ethanol for it to be the primary fuel in every car.) Hydrogen! The US government is spending almost $200 million this year to research it. (We may not see hydrogen cars in serious numbers for at least two decades.)
“There’s nothing – not one thing – that’s emerging as the clear front-runner,” says Jeff Schuster, executive director of global forecasting for the consumer ratings and research organization J.D. Power & Associates. There’s no “This is it. This is the technology that’s going to take us the next 50 to 100 years,” he says. What he and other analysts see is a transitional decade in which the auto industry creeps toward change like, well, like a car that’s just about out of fuel. For all the hype, there’s just no getting around the reality: The gasoline engine is here to stay for the next few decades, at least. Technologies will improve fuel economy to an extent. But many people, including some environmentalists, believe automakers need to spend more time focusing on improving what they’ve already got and less time dreaming about a fleet of hydrogen cars.
“In the near term, these kinds of discussions are moot,” says Don MacKenzie, a vehicles engineer at the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists. “In the next 20-year time frame, the biggest difference we’re going to see is getting more miles per gallon out of gasoline. Looking at hydrogen and other alternative fuels are discussions we need to have. But we need to start taking action today.”
Bromberg, Cohn, and Heywood share this belief – “ ‘Let’s get real’ would be our view,” says Cohn – and that’s why they think their ethanol-engine could succeed. They have formed a company, Ethanol Boosting Systems, around the idea. They have brought in two former Ford Motor Co. executives and a former US senator to round out their board. The team has a combined Rolodex that includes just about every name in the auto industry. It has Ford exploring the idea. It has the data to back it up. And perhaps most important, it has John Heywood. “He’s like one of the revered fathers of the field,” says Chris Rutland, the director of the Engine Research Center at the University of Wisconsin. “He is, I think, a thoughtful, perceptive person. And when he says things, people seem to listen, because I think what he says often has a lot of truth to it.”
John Heywood has been described as the Yoda of the car engine. He has been tinkering with them since 1972, when the mechanical engineering professor became director of MIT’s Sloan Automotive Laboratory, a position he still holds today. His book on the subject, Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals, is famous, at least in the world of mechanical engineering professors and students. His goal has always been simple, though hard to achieve: Make cars more efficient.
Born and raised outside of London, Heywood is known for being a pragmatist. While others were looking 25 to 50 years into the future, he wanted to know what ideas were practical today. And what is needed now, he believes, is a short-term solution, one that can go into effect while researchers are perfecting new technologies. The future, he points out again and again, is a lot further away than people know. One MIT study, which he coauthored with graduate student Anup Bandivadekar in March 2005, said it would be 25 years before hybrids and 30 years before fuel-cell vehicles would have a significant impact on energy use. Heywood, who is 69, believes that is simply too long to wait.
In 1999, Heywood found kindred spirits in Bromberg and Cohn, 63, after hearing about their work. At the time, the two fusion physicists – who have about three dozen patents between them – were working on something called the plasmatron, a device that could convert a variety of fuels into hydrogen-rich gas, reducing pollution and improving engine efficiency. Plasmatrons already existed for industrial applications, but this one was smaller and required less power. Heywood joined the effort, and in 2001, they licensed their device to a Michigan auto-parts manufacturer. But like many good ideas, it didn’t take off. So the three scientists shelved their plasmatron and started thinking of other ways to make a more efficient engine. “And then it hit us,” Cohn recalls. “Why not use ethanol as the second fuel on board?”
Here is how the idea works: In a typical car engine, gasoline vapor mixes with air inside the cylinders. Spark plugs ignite the vapor. The tiny explosions drive the pistons down, and the crankshaft converts the pistons’ work into rotational motion. And the car moves, though somewhat inefficiently. When the temperature in a cylinder gets too high, vapors explode spontaneously, instead of burning steadily. Energy burns faster under these conditions. The pressure rises, and the cylinder vibrates, causing what’s known as “knock,” a condition that both impedes and harms the engine. To avoid it, automakers are forced to build cars with lower compression ratios – in other words, they get less energy out of the air and fuel being compressed in the cylinders.
The key, at least according to the MIT scientists, is lowering the temperature inside the engine, and that’s where the ethanol comes in. When vaporized, ethanol absorbs more than twice as much heat as gasoline. Injecting it directly into the cylinders, therefore, has a cooling effect – something automakers have tried to obtain with other fluids, including water. Water does indeed help lower temperatures. But it also degrades the fuel mixture, Bromberg says. Ethanol doesn’t. Bromberg’s models show that temperatures drop by almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit under these conditions. Knock, at that point, is no longer an issue. Compression ratios could be raised. Cars could become more efficient, and, with turbocharging – a process that allows engines to push more air into the cylinders – they’d be more powerful while using smaller engines. Six cylinders, or even four, could do the job of eight. Ethanol-boosted cars could be 25 percent more efficient than cars on the road today, Heywood says, and about 15 percent more efficient than cars rolling out in the next few years. Using less gasoline would mean greenhouse-gas emissions would fall. And because the technology already exists – direct-injection gasoline engines are on highways today – making new cars with the ethanol-boosted engine would be a relatively inexpensive change. The scientists say their idea is not only greener than clean diesel, it’s about $2,000 to $2,500 cheaper to build. And cheaper than a hybrid, too. Think two-thirds the benefit at one-third the cost.
“I am very cautious about saying that one technology will save us, because it doesn’t work like that,” Heywood says. Like most experts, he believes the auto industry will use many technologies in the years ahead to improve fuel economy and reduce emissions. But he thinks the ethanol-boosted engine could be one of those technologies, and others outside MIT agree with him. In late 2005, major names began signing on with the scientists. Paul Blumberg, a consultant and former director of vehicle and powertrain research at Ford, Neil Ressler, a consultant and Ford’s former chief technology officer, and former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston, who once chaired the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, all joined the board of Ethanol Boosting Systems. Dubbed “five geeks and a politician” by Bromberg, the men began dreaming of a day when every car would have two tanks – one for gas and one for ethanol – and the world would be just a little bit better off.
“We think it’s doable,” Blumberg says. “And, ultimately, it could be totally transparent [to drivers]. If this becomes mainline technology, you could fill two tanks at the same time with a concentric nozzle. One fuel goes into one tank, and the other fuel goes into the other tank. One transaction. That’s it.”
But it may not be quite that simple.
Inventors, by nature, are optimists. And automotive inventors are no different. But their road is littered with the rusting skeletons of rejected ideas. Thirty-five years ago, the gas turbine engine, the steam engine, and the Freon engine were all touted as the answer to our problems. They all failed. Tiny electric vehicles with futuristic names like 512 Urban Car were going to save the world. They didn’t. We were supposed to be driving hydrogen-powered cars by now. We aren’t. The story of the Car of the Future, written so many times, is more like a fairy tale. Except without the fairy-tale ending.
Most innovative ideas come with obstacles. And that’s the case with the ethanol-boosted engine as well. Nicholas Twork, a Ford spokesman, confirmed that the automaker has tested the MIT idea. But he wouldn’t tell me any specifics for proprietary reasons and was cautious when talking about this engine. “If the numbers are indeed true – which they may be – there are a lot of factors that need to be considered,” he says, “like where do you get the ethanol?” It’s a problem, admits Blumberg. For this idea to work, ethanol needs to become more accessible. According to the US Department of Energy, E85, an 85 percent ethanol fuel that can be used in “flex-fuel’’ cars today, is not yet available at any gas station in Massachusetts. But even if it were easily obtainable, Blumberg says, a major question still looms. “Will consumers mind filling up with two fuels?” he asks.
Of course they’ll mind. “The thing that may hold them back is that separate fuel tank,” Schuster says. “Even if it’s not nearly as frequent as putting gasoline in the vehicle, it’s still another thing we have to do. . . . When you give somebody an extra step to do on their commute, just getting from point A to point B, you have to factor it in.”
The MIT scientists are aware of the obstacles. They know their idea could work perfectly and still fail if automakers aren’t certain consumers will buy it. And they know US drivers are resistant to change, even as evidence mounts that change is needed.
“It’s very difficult because, of course, it tends to run head-on into our culture,” says Heywood, sitting in his office at MIT and talking generally about the mind-set of American drivers. “We like the freedom to do what we want, how we want it. We love our big vehicles. They give us flexibility and a sense of power. We like things that accelerate fast. We’ve gone beyond what’s reasonable, and we’re going to have to climb back, but it’s going to be hard. I’d almost say it doesn’t fit with the American lifestyle, because we’ll have to think less big.”
But like all inventors, Heywood and the others believe change is possible and, perhaps, coming soon. They have put $150,000 of their own money into the project and hope Ford – or another automaker – will invest the $1 million to $1.5 million needed to build a prototype in the next year. They believe ethanol use will continue to expand and that cars with ethanol-boosted engines could be in production by 2011. A number of patents for the engine technology are pending.
These cars wouldn’t necessarily have a futuristic look or feel to them. They wouldn’t fall silent at stoplights like hybrids, and they wouldn’t have to be small. They could be as big as the cars we drive now; more efficient, but not a radical departure. And that might be the best part of all about this idea. The Car of the Future – at least the near future – might look and feel pretty much like the car in your driveway.
Keith O’Brien is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain. E-mail comments to keith@keithob.com. 