Kicking the oil habit

Kicking the oil habit

By The Associated Press
CHICAGO (AP) — The future of energy is bright in Said Al-Hallaj’s invention lab at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and not just because of the solar window that lies in development on a table.

All around the lab are advanced alternative energy projects that testify to the war on oil that’s proceeding quietly at laboratories and research centers across the country.

A tiny two-passenger electric car stands ready to drive 25 miles on one charge of its custom-designed pack of lithium-ion batteries, not unlike the ones that power laptops. A research assistant who’s working out the kinks on an electric bicycle motors down a hallway at 20 mph, triple the speed of the hybrid fuel-cell scooter developed here.

Elsewhere, Al-Hallaj and another professor are converting an SUV into a plug-in hybrid vehicle using lithium-ion cells to double the fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. And a team of students is converting a gasoline-powered lawnmower to use hydrogen as fuel.

Some of the projects could be manufactured commercially right now, said Al-Hallaj, research associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering and coordinator of IIT’s renewable energy program. The problem is cost, which keeps them from competing with oil — for now.

“The implications if we succeed are unbelievable,” Al-Hallaj said. “You’re coming up with a solution that is clean and advanced for the environment and people who are burdened by high prices.”

Solutions for high gasoline prices might seem painfully far off to drivers as summer travel season begins, but experts say the skyrocketing costs of oil and gas have given new momentum to the push to develop alternative fuels and alternative energy sources.

The efforts are readily apparent in the nation’s heartland, where a boom in ethanol is expanding and scientists at laboratories far and wide are working to turn agricultural waste or “biomass” such as switchgrass, wheat straw, cornstalks and miscanthus into a fuel called cellulosic ethanol that could be produced commercially to reduce U.S. dependence on oil.

In a separate burst of alternative energy developments unrelated to transportation fuels, wind farms are sprouting up across the country thanks to larger, more efficient turbines and coal-to-energy technology holds promise for pollution-free power plants in the future.

HYBRID VEHICLES

Don Hillebrand has worked on many alternative energy ideas as director of the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.

He is most excited about its potential to play a lead role among the national labs in developing plug-in hybrids.

A standard hybrid such as the Toyota Prius uses an electric motor, a small battery and a gasoline motor. With a plug-in hybrid, the small battery is replaced by much bigger battery packs that can be recharged through a standard 120-volt outlet.

With such a car, a driver could travel the first 10, 20 or even 40 miles of a trip on battery power before the vehicle would switch to the gasoline engine, Hillebrand says.

“You’ve now just, for most people, eliminated ... half of all the oil they use,” he says.

Drawbacks remain. Owning a plug-in hybrid would be a challenge for anyone who does not live in a single-family home with a garage or carport and a readily available outlet.

Before the plug-in hybrid could hit the road in mass numbers, the batteries would likely have to become lighter, less expensive and longer lasting. And there is concern about the capability of the electrical grid to support a nationwide fleet of such vehicles — although supporters say most would be charged overnight, during off-peak hours for utilities.

With a concerted effort to solve the battery problems, Hillebrand says, plug-in hybrids could be feasible for mass production in 18 months.

Because the technology is still being perfected, it’s unclear how long a battery would have to be charged to yield the optimum mileage. But supporters say they expect the electrical cost to amount to less than $1 per gallon.

ETHANOL FROM BIoMASS

By using other crops and forest waste along with the entire corn plant, not just the kernels, the Department of Energy says enough cellulosic ethanol could be produced by 2030 to lower U.S. gasoline consumption 30 percent.

Scientists at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Ill., are among those on a mission to expand ethanol beyond a grain-based fuel, working intensely on how best to break down the cellulose of biomass into sugars and complex chemicals in order to produce ethanol economically. An optimal solution still might be a decade away.

Mike Cotta, who heads the U.S. Department of Agriculture-run center in Peoria, says many technical challenges remain to be overcome.

Researchers must come up with more inexpensive and environmentally viable ways of converting the polymers that the bulky biomass materials are made of into simple sugars.
But a lot has happened in recent years to move them closer to their goal, including great progress cited by Cotta in developing cheaper, more efficient enzymes to break the materials down.

“It’s just been totally crazy,” Seth Snyder, section leader for chemical and biological technology, said of the stepped-up demand for workshops and research information. “Everybody’s interested now. ... We’ve been saying all along we can make a big impact, and suddenly people are saying ‘Maybe these people are right.”’

Corn-based ethanol

The highest-profile existing oil alternative is ethanol.

The corn-based fuel might not hold the key to an oil-free future, but it is providing at least a stopgap remedy while scientists look beyond corn for an answer.

The runup in gas prices has softened for now the argument that ethanol is not economically competitive without federal subsidies, and it has accelerated plans for ethanol plants by farmers’ cooperatives and Archer Daniels Midland Co., the Decatur, Ill.-based agribusiness, among others.

“With petroleum prices being as high as they are, the stars are aligning for looking seriously at alternative fuels and chemicals,” said Hans Blaschek, a University of Illinois microbiology professor working on the conversion of corn into butanol, a promising alternative to petroleum-based fuels.

Still, ethanol’s potential is limited by cost and transport issues and the fact that even those seemingly endless fields of corn in the Midwest are finite.

Experts say corn-based ethanol isn’t ever likely to displace more than 10 percent of the gasoline supply.

“We just don’t have enough corn,” said Dan Basse, an analyst for Chicago-based AgResource Co. “If you turned every corn plant in the country into ethanol, there still wouldn’t be enough.”

BIODIESEL FROM VEGETABLE OIL

Another biofuel with promise is biodiesel, which uses vegetable oil and other nontoxic ingredients and can be blended with conventional diesel fuel. The trucking industry in particular has interest, and the Department of Agriculture says it can reduce carbon emissions by 78 percent.

But despite growing use in some areas of B11 — an 11 percent biodiesel fuel — overall consumption is still relatively tiny and biodiesel is not likely to be an everyday alternative for motorists in the near future. Only a handful of large biodiesel plants exist nationwide.

Dayton Keyes of the central Illinois town of Maroa decided not to wait. Angry about prices spiraling ever higher, the 37-year-old police officer built a small biodiesel reactor in his garage last year and now tanks up his Volkswagen Golf with a homemade fuel concocted from used cooking oil.

“It just ticks me off to no end to see that even a 10-cent change in the average fuel price kills us and our politicians are doing nothing to solve it,” said Keyes, who commutes 105 miles round-trip daily to his job in Springfield. “I thought, ‘Shoot, I’m going to try to do something about this.”’

Inspired by media reports about a cross-country excursion using cooking oil as fuel, he found information on the Internet, ordered a how-to book and invested close to $1,000 in constructing a reactor — plus a few hours every week brewing up batches of biodiesel.

The result is a fuel that costs him only about 70 cents a gallon, gets 45 miles per gallon and has converted him to a biodiesel proselyte who hopes to hasten the time when biofuels abound. He is trying to get a full-fledged biodiesel plant up and running.

“Renewable resources is a buzzword right now, but you don’t see evidence of it,” he said. “I’m trying to get a biodiesel revolution going where people will start making their own fuel.”