Isobutanol, a biofuel with energy density similar to gasoline, has hit a milestone with its first win in the American LeMans Series.

Dyson Racing has been running the alt fuel in its Castrol Mazda Lola LMP2 coupe this year, and drivers Chris Dyson and Guy Smith took first at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Challenge last weekend. They finished half a second ahead of Patron Highcroft Racing to win in grand style, recording the fastest lap and setting a race record.

“We had a good car all weekend,” Dyson said. “It stopped well, put the power down in key areas, and it was extremely consistent as the fuel burned off.”

Ah, the fuel.

The team is running isobutanol, specifically isobutanol blended with ethanol to create a biofuel with energy density similar to gasoline. The introduction of the isobutanol blend (20 percent isobutanol, 80 percent ethanol) brings to five the number of alt-fuels running in the American Le Mans Series, joining E10 ethanol, E85 cellulosic ethanol, diesel and gas-electric hybrids.

The fuel is being developed by BP (yes, that BP) under a partnership with Dyson and MazdaSpeed. The Dyson Lola is powered by a Mazda MZR-R 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder that puts down 500 horsepower and more than 400 pound feet of torque.

Photo: Dyson Racing

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Readily available technology can cut the fuel consumption of passenger cars as much as 50 percent without impacting performance or comfort but would add as much as $9,000 to the price of new vehicles.

Such are the trade-offs in our quest to boost efficiency while maintaining our love affair with the automobile, and they are spelled out in a report by the National Academy of Sciences. The academy asked 12 engineers, scientists and industry insiders to examine commercially available technology and its impact on fuel consumption.

“Reducing the amount of fuel we use is an important goal for the nation and for the individual consumer,” said Trevor O. Jones, chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “These technologies, whether adopted individually or in combination, offer the potential to meet that objective. Consumers will need to consider the trade-offs between higher vehicle prices and saving fuel and money at the gas pump.”

The study is significant because federal fuel economy rules require new cars and trucks to achieve a fleetwide average of 34.1 mpg within six years. Federal regulators are currently working on even tighter rules that would take effect between 2017 and 2025.

There is nothing revolutionary about any of the technology the panel examined, and all of it — gasoline engines with improvements like direct injection, so-called “clean diesel” engines and gas-electric drivetrains — are being adopted by automakers to varying degrees. Ford, for example, has tweaked the 305-horsepower V-6 engine in the 2011 Mustang to return 31 mpg on the highway. Diesels, long popular in Europe, are making inroads in North America. And hybrids like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight, are increasingly common, even if they remain a small fraction of vehicles sold each year.

But the report, “Assessment of Technologies for Improving Light Duty Vehicle Fuel Economy,” provides a glimpse at just what those technologies add to the bottom line.

The committee responsible for the study estimated the fuel savings and added costs of boosting the efficiency of a conventional gasoline engine compared to using a diesel engine or a hybrid drivetrain. As you might expect, the cheapest improvements came by making conventional engines more efficient.

One of the cheapest things automakers can do is adopt cylinder deactivation. The technology allows six- or eight-cylinder engines to run on fewer cylinders when full power is not required. That can cut fuel use 10 percent while adding just $350 to $500 to the price of the car. Direct injection, cold-air induction, variable valve timing and other tricks can cut fuel consumption by 29 percent but add $2,200 to the cost of a vehicle.

Such technologies will only become more prevalent because internal combustion gasoline engines will remain the dominant drivetrain for 10 to 15 years or more, the report states. Despite the availability of diesels and hybrids, such vehicles accounted for about 5 percent of all vehicles sold in the United States in 2008, according to J.D. Power and Associates.

Speaking of diesels, the study says swapping a gasoline engine for a diesel would yield a 37 percent reduction in fuel use. So-called “advanced” compression-ignition diesels coming to market in the next five years will cut consumption another 7 to 13 percent. Such engines will, however, boost the sticker price by $4,600 for passenger cars and $5,900 for larger vehicles, the study states.

Hybrids have the biggest impact on fuel consumption — and price. But the impact depends upon the application. A full hybrid vehicle, which uses electricity exclusively when traveling at low speeds and electricity to assist in acceleration — offers the greatest gains. Such drivetrains can cut fuel consumption by up to 50 percent, but will add $9,000 to the price of the car, the study states. The Prius is an example of a full hybrid.

Mild hybrids, which use smaller electric motors and batteries and rely more heavily upon internal combustion, can use 43 percent less fuel while adding $6,000 to the cost of a vehicle, the study finds. The Honda Civic Hybrid is an example of a mild hybrid.

Regardless of the level of hybridization, the biggest gains come in vehicles specifically designed to maximize aerodynamic efficiency and minimize rolling resistance while using the smallest possible gasoline engine, the study states.

Automakers need not pack their vehicles with advanced technology to see improvements. Six-speed manual gearboxes (or seven- and even eight-speed automatics) can boost efficiency, as can cutting the weight of vehicles. Even simpler tricks like using low rolling resistance tires and making aerodynamic improvements can yield gains.

The Environmental Protection Agency is examining all the components in a typical automobile, what they cost to make and what it could cost to increase fuel economy. The results should provide a better idea of the impact increased efficiency will have on the price of new vehicles.

The panel was not asked to consider how long it would take to recoup in fuel savings the cost of the technology; that task will be left to regulators as they contemplate tougher fuel economy and emissions standards. Those regulators, the panel notes, should revise fuel economy testing procedures to reflect real-world driving practices and conditions instead of the ideal laboratory settings currently used.

Read the National Academy of Sciences report online here.

Photo: Esthr / Flickr

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• We Can Double Automotive Fuel Efficiency (Relatively) Easily

Natural gas has always been the least sexy alt-fuel, but an advocacy group is aiming to change that with a saucy new video on YouTube.

EVs have the Volt, hydrogen has the FCX — heck, even biodiesel has old Benzes and Willie Nelson, which apparently works for some folks. But think about natural gas and you’ll undoubtedly picture dinged up Crown Vics sitting in a City Hall parking lot.

The natural gas advocates at NGVsNow wanted to change the public’s perception of their favorite fuel, so they put together a pro-NGVs video that has more extended double entendres than the Betty White Muffin sketch.

In the video, available on the group’s website and on YouTube, everyone from a young couple to a lonely limo driver brags about how they “get it.” Of course, “it” is natural gas, and it’s something that can be got at some gas stations and from home refueling appliances, like the one shown above.

According to NGVsNow, the video got over 4,000 hits in the first 36 hours it was up and, unusually for YouTube, generated a nearly-intelligent discussion among commenters about the merits of natural gas as an alternative fuel.

Photo: Flickr/Rockershirt

Video: NGVsNow

One of the big issues facing hydrogen is just where we’re supposed to fill the cars that might run on the stuff. A Connecticut company is answering that question on the East Coast with plans for a “hydrogen highway” that will extend from Portland, Maine, to southern Florida.

California historically has been a hotbed of hydrogen research and development, but SunHydro wants to put the East Coast on the H2 map with 11 solar refueling stations. The self-contained stations use electrolysis technology from Proton Energy that takes electricity generated from solar power and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The process results in considerably fewer emissions than the traditional methods of shipping hydrogen to fueling stations by truck or reforming it from natural gas.

“Our goal is to make it possible for hydrogen car to drive from Maine to Miami strictly on sun and water,” company president Michael Grey said.

For all the attention on electric cars these days, several automakers continue developing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Honda is especially enamored with the technology. General Motors put the Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell vehicle in a few dozen driveways. Nissan is leasing a XTrail FCV truck to Coca-Cola. And Mercedes Benz will offer the F-Cell to “selected customers” in Europe and the United States this spring. Mazda and Volkswagen are among the technology’s proponents as well.

So, beyond giving the few hydrogen cars on the road a place to fuel up, the stations could help solve the the “chicken and egg” problem where the lack of fueling infrastructure begot a lack of cars and vice-versa.

“Having talked to several of the auto manufacturers, the indication that we’ve received is that there has to be a network of stations on the east coast for them to bring the cars here,” Grey said. “They want to bring the cars here, but there’s nowhere to fuel them.”

That quandary is familiar to Paul Williamson of the University of Montana College of Technology. “There’s no sense having hydrogen cars if there’s no place to refuel them,” Williamson said. “Most of the development is happening in California. Why? Because they have refueling stations.”

Williamson, whose family owned a service station when he was younger, likens the adoption of hydrogen technology to the early days of diesel. “We put in a pump behind our service station to begin with, and we had some cars and trucks here and there,” he said.

Similarly, SunHydro’s stations will appeal to early adopters and will be able to fill 10 to 15 vehicles per day to start. That isn’t much, but you’ve got to start somewhere. The first stations will be located in Portland, Maine; Braintree, Massachusetts; Wallingford, Connecticut; South Hackensack, New Jersey; Claymont, Delaware; Richmond, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; and Orlando and Miami, Florida. If all goes well, Grey said the company hopes to expand westward.

“We’ve just decided that somebody needed to start this process,” Grey said. “You have a lot of the big companies talk about it, but nobody’s stepped up to the plate and made it happen.”

The company says using solar power to split water makes the capital requirements and maintenance costs cheaper than other hydrogen technologies. “From an efficiency standpoint, using the sun to make hydrogen is probably the most efficient method out there,” Mark Schiller, Vice President of Business Development at Proton, said.

The stations cost as much as $3 million to install and rely on private funding to make it happen (Tom Sullivan, founder of the Lumber Liquidators flooring supply chain, paid $10.2 million for Proton in August). Williamson says that’s the cost of doing business for a future-oriented company.

“You’ve got to have some visionary risk taking if you want to be a company of the future,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll fall by the wayside.”

Photo of a Mercedes-Benz F-Cell: Daimler

See Also:

• Mercedes Brings Hydrogen to the Highway Next Spring
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• Hydrogen Cars Won’t Make a Difference for 40 Years
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For all the joy of Christmas morning, there’s certainly a lot of waste involved. Reams of wrapping paper, forests of evergreens and piles of unwanted fruitcakes are discarded after the holidays. That got us thinking: Wouldn’t it be great if some of that trash could be repurposed as fuel?

Turns out it can.

We checked with Spencer Quong, an automotive engineer and alt-fuels expert with a sense of humor. He was with the Union of Concerned Scientists before launching his own consulting biz, Quong & Associates. He assured us that family gatherings aren’t the only sources of combustion during the holidays. Pretty much everything you discard at the holidays could, theoretically, be used as fuel, though Quong warns “it’s hard to think of something that isn’t South Park–ish.”

We’ll get to that in a moment. But first on our list is fruitcake. They certainly aren’t edible, and they’ll take about a million years to biodegrade, so what the hell are we supposed to do with them? The answer is simple.

Biofuel.

“There is, in the fruitcake, sugar and grain,” Quong told Autopia. “All of that can be converted to ethanol.”

While Quong conceded that the refining process would be cost-prohibitive, the supply is nearly endless.

“There’s probably a million fruitcakes that have been passed around for 20 years,” he said.

We all spend too much time carefully wrapping gifts, only to have the recipients mindlessly rip all that paper and ribbon to shreds. Quong says you can turn it into cellulosic ethanol. Got a diesel in the driveway? Increased consumption of Chinese food on Christmas Eve would inevitably yield waste cooking oil that could be used as biodiesel. If you’re really ambitious, convert the car to run on veggie oil. Christmas trees and yule logs are ripe for gasification, a process that creates synthetic fuel from carbonaceous solids. Unfortunately, Santa and his reindeer might end up coughing from the resulting pollution.

“Gasification is a little bit out there because of the smog emissions that come with it, and carrying all that equipment is difficult,” Quong said.

Speaking of reindeer, biomethane captured from Rudolph’s refuse may be an ideal source of renewable energy.

“It’s very similar to cow manure,” Quong said. “You take the methane that comes off that, and then you can power vehicles from that.”

While reindeer poo could power UPS trucks bearing gifts, we’re still glad Gene Autry never got the chance to sing about it.

Photo: Flickr/timsamoff

See Also:

• Dec. 22, 1882: Looking at Christmas in a New Light

Paying through the nose to fill up the car is enough to send anyone into a rage, but it might be the fumes you’re inhaling while pumping gas that make you angry.

Amal Kinawy of Cairo University found that rats exposed to gasoline fumes were more aggressive than those breathing clean air and more likely to show signs of anxiety. What’s more, their brains experienced changes in neurotransmitters in the hypothalamus, hippocampus and cerebellum. Although Kinaway limited her research to rats, she says the findings could apply to humans and be a factor in road rage.

“Heightened aggression may be yet another risk for the human population chronically exposed to urban air polluted by automobile smoke,” she said. “Millions of people every day are exposed to gasoline fumes while refueling their cars.”

Kinawy subjected 15 rats to leaded gasoline — which is still available in Egypt — and 15 to unleaded fuel. Fifteen others were used as a control group. The rats were exposed to gasoline vapors for 30 minutes each day for six weeks, then housed for 10 days with litter mates that had not been used in the test.

She found the rats that had breathed gas fumes were more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior such as chattering their teeth, arching their backs and biting. Rats exposed to unleaded fuel were slightly more likely to show aggression than those exposed to leaded fuel.

Each rat was dissected, and Kinawy discovered exposure to gasoline fumes had altered the animals’ brains.

“Rats exposed to unleaded gasoline showed indications of increased damage caused by free radicals and altered levels of neurotransmitters in the brain cortex region, in comparison with the control or leaded-gasoline groups,” she said. “Furthermore, inhalation of both fuels induced significant fluctuations in neurotransmitters in the hypothalamus, hippocampus and cerebellum.”

The study appears in the online journal BMC Physiology.

Photo: Flickr / markvall