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Fuel Freedom Staff

Hot Rod explains why race-car drivers love methanol

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Methanol has been a preferred fuel for race-car drivers and teams for decades, for various reasons.

In the movie PUMP, racing teams explain that the lower cost, compared with gasoline, is a big selling point. The footage, which depicts the 91st running of the Race to the Clouds on Pikes Peak, in Colorado, in 2013, includes an interview with one mechanic who says his crew has been running on methanol for 19 years. “It’s just a much better fuel for racing,” he says.

We could go on about the safety of methanol — it burns cleaner than gasoline, is less flammable and burns “cooler” — but come on. What really gets the gearheads salivating is the pure power of methanol.

Methanol has less energy content than regular gasoline, so vehicles get about half the mpg out of the fuel. But it has a higher octane.

As the smart people at Hot Rod magazine explain, race-car engines are built to squeeze more power out of that less-energy-dense methanol, by adjusting the air-to-fuel ratio.

While it’s true that gasoline has a higher energy density (about 18,400 BTU/pound) than methanol (9,500 BTU/pound), if you can burn three times more methanol than gasoline per power stroke, you can make more power. An engine that flows 1,000 cfm of air (about 70 pounds worth) means that on gasoline, the engine will consume about 5.6 pounds of fuel based upon its 12.5:1 max power ratio, giving a total energy output of (5.6 pounds x 18,400 BTU) or 103,040 BTUs of energy. If we do the same calculation on methanol, we get 17.5 pounds of fuel burned, and (17.5 pounds x 9,500 BTU) or 166,250 BTUs of energy—that’s a 60 percent greater energy output.

These folks have forgotten more about engines than most people will ever know, so here’s some more knowledge: Methanol is the better fuel at conserving heat inside an engine. With gasoline, more of that heat is wasted.

Gasoline, when it undergoes a phase change can suck out about 150 BTUs of heat energy per pound of fuel, which results in a temperature drop. Methanol, on the other hand, takes 506 BTUs per pound of fuel of heat energy to make the phase change. When we look at our above example of an engine flowing 1,000 cfm of air, the 5.6 pounds of gasoline will take about 840 BTUs of energy, versus 8,855 BTUs for methanol—more than 10 times as much. This is what makes methanol such an effective fuel in forced-induction applications like turbocharging and supercharging, and it absorbs so much heat that an intercooler often isn’t even needed.

Arctic Leaf

Will renewables survive the oil downturn?

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The seven-month-long plunge in oil prices appeared to be enough to re-establish gasoline as the default fuel for motorists, while stunting the progress of replacement fuels.

But attendees at last month’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit would have thought differently. Prominently displayed were various alternative vehicles that have been making headway and are just building momentum in the auto market, so they may be able to shrug off the precipitous fall in oil prices.

Also exhibited in Detroit was the first generation of hydrogen vehicles from Japan, which are challenging both the gasoline monopoly and the electric car, which is much more popular in America and Europe. The Honda FCV concept car boasts a driving range of about 300 miles and a refueling time of just three minutes, marking another step forward for the hydrogen fuel industry. California, where the cars are to be introduced later this year, is already preparing its “hydrogen highway,” which will make the cars feasible for drivers. Toyota’s fuel-cell offering, the Mirai — which also runs on hydrogen — is also scheduled to hit showrooms this year.

Chevrolet has had middling success with its electric-gasoline hybrid the Volt, but the maker has another generation planned with its concept car, the Bolt. The car will be made of extremely lightweight material and will have an all-glass roof and aluminum wheels for further weight reduction. Its lithium-ion battery will give the car a range of 200 miles and a recharging time of 40 minutes for an 80 percent charge. The price of $30,000 is likely to expand the market for electric cars.

Analysts note that oil is not used much for electricity anymore. The 1980s are the benchmark and generally remembered as the “Valley of Death” for renewables. Wind and solar were undercut by falling oil prices and lost their place in the generation of electricity. At the time, oil was providing 17 percent of our electricity. Now it provides barely 5 percent, and wind and solar energy have not felt any effect from oil prices.

Of course, natural gas has largely replaced oil, and a drop in gas prices could cut into the advance of renewables. Gas prices have traditionally been between one-sixth and one-twelfth of oil prices but have uncoupled themselves in recent years. This could work both ways, since gas prices have not fallen by the same degree that oil prices have.

Gas still holds its edge, however, and this means the attempt to use natural gas as an oil substitute may not slow. T. Boone Pickens has had some success in switching long-haul trucks to compressed natural gas, and this effort may be slowed only a little by gasoline’s new low price. However, if natural gas prices fall as well, then it may be able to keep pace with lower oil prices. The possibility that cheaper natural gas might encourage the conversion to methanol as a gasoline substitute would also be encouraged by falling natural gas prices.

That leaves the big question of whether ethanol can survive in the face of falling gasoline prices. In the first place, low gas prices are not likely to last forever. Some analysts are predicting crude oil prices will probably bounce back to $75 a barrel in the near future. Second, ethanol is protected by the federal mandate that says each gallon must contain 10 percent ethanol. If falling gas prices encourage the purchase of more gasoline – which it already has – then ethanol consumption must climb as well.

Ethanol has been under fire recently from studies that say it competes with food resources. The latest is a report from the World Resources Institute in Washington, which argues that “There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world.” But the rapid development of cellulosic ethanol severely reduces the possibility that ethanol will compete with food crops. And the possibility that natural-gas-based methanol might begin substituting for ethanol makes the threat of competing with food crops even less.

Altogether, it appears that renewable energy and alternate vehicles are going to survive the dramatic fall in oil prices. Alternative vehicles and other related technologies are now too far along to be crushed by falling oil prices the way they were in the 1980s.

(Photo: The Toyota Mirai at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November. Credit: Vision Automotriz, Flickr)

Arctic Leaf

Puncturing the myth of 14X improvement in biofuels

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Jim Lane was demonstrating some of his usual skepticism when he took on the story of a 14X improvement in the production of biofuels last week.

The story began with an item in Renewable Energy World, Green Car Congress and several other publications. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory published a report on its website stating that a bacterium had been discovered that processed biofuel from cellulose material at 14 times the rate of previously used bacteria.

Lane starts with an apology as to why Biofuels Digest didn’t get too excited about this announcement.

You may have wondered why the discovery was not also hailed in The Digest this week, and on the topic there’s good and bad news, friends.

The good news is that such an enzyme exists, though it doesn’t quite perform at the 14X level and isn’t out of the lab yet. The bad news is that the research that inspired the article actually was published in Science in 2013. Sorry, folks, not a new breakthrough.

First, Lane takes these publications to school for a little elementary arithmetic. The articles said that the new microbe “revealed twice the total sugar conversion in two days” that the present microbe “usually produced in seven.” But as Lane points out, that means it’s 7X as effective, not 14X. But “What does it matter,” he says. “Two of the stubborn problems in converting cellulose to fuels have been the cost of enzymes and the capex [capital expenditures] associated with the technology.” Neither problem is really addressed by the new enzyme.

Actually, the new enzyme – caldicellulosedisruptor bescii, which was discovered in a region of hot springs and land on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula — does hold some promise. Because they are so tolerant of heat (up to 193 degrees F), they promise to eliminate the pretreatment of cellulosic material, which would mean a huge saving in processing. Almost half the cost of reducing cellulosic material to sugars comes in pre-treatment. The trick will be getting the process that has been demonstrated in the lab to be repeated on a commercial scale. “Let’s locate all of this where it is, which is in the lab. Which is about 10 years from appearing in an at-scale process somewhere, you average out the timelines for bringing processes based on other microbes to full commercial scale.”

Which is to say, no one has shown that these results can be achieved in a 500 liter fermenter, much less a million liter monster as we see in commercial scale operations. There’s going to be, lime, zero knowledge at this stage about the behavior of these microbes in a fermenter under the incomplete mixing conditions that almost invariably are found at scale.

So, let’s keep the risks in mind, and the timelines, too – even as we hail a genuinely promising and fascinating scientific advance.

Lane has some quiet optimism about the process itself. He isn’t as entirely cynical as he would let on.

There has indeed been some research showing that the CelA bacteria can handle large quantities of cellulosic material in a commercial setting. As BioDigest reported last year, “a group of researchers led by the University of Georgia’s Mike Adams demonstrated that caldicellolusiruptor could “without pretreatment, break down biomass, including lignin, and release sugars for biofuels and chemicals production.” The group wrote in Energy & Environmental Science that “the majority (85%) of insoluble switchgrass biomass that had not been previously chemically treated was degraded at 78 °C by the anaerobic bacterium Caldicellulosiruptor bescii.)”

Digesting switchgrass and other cellulosic material into sugars — which can easily be converted to ethanol — would be a huge advance, even if it took ten years to bring into play. Even if it’s not the miracle that some have touted, it’s a huge advance. The question of which publication broke the story first will fade, and we’ll soon know if the new bacteria really can help us turn seemingly intractable vegetable material into a useful fuel.

Fuel Freedom Staff

Hydrogen-powered cars steal some sex appeal in Detroit

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Visitors to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week likely were awe-struck, along with critics, at the sight of the new high-powered Acura NSX and the Ford GT.

But this might be the show where hydrogen-powered vehicles finally graduated from the drawing board to the public consciousness.

Much buzz was created in the Motor City when Honda unveiled its FCV (for fuel-cell vehicle) concept car, which is expected to go on sale in the United States in 2016. The car is an answer to Toyota’s Mirai FCV, which is expected to be available in the U.S. later this year (Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe became the first person in the world to get one last week.)

The cars join the Hyundai Tucson and the Mercedes F-Cell in the hydrogen ranks. Hyundai reportedly has decided to lower the price of its vehicle (said to be about $139,000) to increase its competitiveness with its rivals.

Cost could be a big issue with consumers: The Mirai costs about $62,000, roughly the same as the Honda FCV.

Refueling access is another issue: There are only 13 hydrogen stations in the U.S., 11 of them in California. But the state is investing more than $46 million to build 28 new stations.

FCVs combine hydrogen, from a tank or cell, with oxygen that powers an electric motor. The key benefit is the short refueling time: Honda said its FCV could be fueled in about 3 minutes (at about 10,00 pounds per square inch). The vehicle has a range of roughly 300 miles, an improvement over the 240 achieved by Honda’s first-generation fuel-cell vehicle, the FCX Clarity. The Mirai also has about a 300-mile range.

One person unimpressed with all the attention hydrogen-powered cars were getting in Detroit was Tesla founder Elon Musk. As MLive reported:

“I just think they’re extremely silly,” he told reporters at Automotive News’ annual World Congress.

Musk argued that hydrogen acts as an energy storage unit, not a source of it, making it impractical for powering vehicles. He called drawing hydrogen from water “an extremely inefficient” process.

“If you’re going to pick an energy storage mechanism, hydrogen is just an extremely dumb one to pick,” Musk said.

Toyota is undaunted, saying it will share the 5,680 patents that went into its hydrogen fuel cells. Musk announced last year that Tesla would make its patents available to other carmakers.

Time reported:

“Hopefully by sharing these patents with others, these new fuel systems can be refined and improved,” said Toyota Senior Vice President Bob Carter, “to attract a larger market of buyers.”

The Mirai is starting with a small batch of 700 vehicles in 2014 with the goal of growing to tens of thousands by the 2020s. “We believe hydrogen electric will be the primary fuel for the next 100 years,” Carter said.

(Photo: Honda FCV, via Honda.com)

Arctic Leaf

Swappable batteries make a comeback, in the Smartscooter

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Shai Agassi had a great idea. Buy an electric car in which you can swap out the battery for a fresh one. That way you bypass the recharging time, which may be up to 4 hours.

It was a great idea, and Agassi got a lot of publicity when he introduced it in 2011. He was going to set up a network of charging stations in Israel, then try to expand into Europe and the United States. But A Better Place, Agassi’s company, declared bankruptcy in 2013. The idea didn’t catch on. Battery-swapping stations proved more complicated and difficult than anticipated, and the idea just didn’t resonate with motorists.

Now a secretive American designer named Horace Luke has come up with the same idea, but he wants to apply it to a new electric scooter called the Smartscooter. The battery will be much smaller. The machine in which you exchange your depleted battery for a new one will be about the size of an ATM. You will get about 40 miles to the charge, which will make it excellent for commuting. Altogether, it’s not just an alternative vehicle but an entirely seamless system he hopes will revolutionize transportation. Once the idea catches on with scooter owners, he hopes it will eventually extend to cars as well.

There are pluses and minuses to the idea: Luke hopes it will diminish dependence on gasoline and introduce electric vehicles as a true alternative. Critics point out that there are no reliable indicators that powering a car with electricity does anything to reduce carbon emissions, especially if some of the electricity is produced by coal, which provides 46 percent of the nation’s power. Luke counters that much electricity can be produced by wind and solar, and that batteries are an excellent way of storing surplus power. There is even talk that these batteries will be a way of evening out the ups and downs of the grid — although, of course, they will not be able to feed the grid and get you home from work on your Smartscooter at the same time.

There are other problems as well. Many people complain that scooters are useless in the rain and cold, while others say a good raincoat or warm clothing will solve that problem. There are also concerns about scooter finding a place to park where they can be chained up, and worries that they are easily stolen. But overall, the idea of a scooter that can be easily recharged and make 60 miles per hour on an electric battery seems to have some appeal.

In any case, it’s enough to help Luke raise $150 million for his company, Gogoro, which intends to start marketing the scooter system this year. Both the price of the scooter and the subscription that will allow the owner to start swapping batteries are yet to be announced.

Luke is not the first since Agassi to come up with the idea of substituting swapping for recharging. In defiance of Agassi’s abortive effort, Tesla has shown off a concept for a station that would allow a Model S to replace its battery in 90 seconds. Although the system was promised by the end of 2013, Tesla has barely mentioned it since. There was some talk about a launch early this year. The problem is that a Tesla battery weights about 100 pounds and requires a complex system to replace, whereas the scooter battery exchange can easily be handled by one person. “We no longer want to talk about charge time,” said Luke, “we want to talk about swap time.”

The Smartscooter received a nice write-up in the current edition of Wired, but even there the sophisticated readership had its doubts that the technology could be applied to cars. One online commenter wrote: “Even if it [the battery] could be replaced in 1 second, people would still rather fill their tanks, than assembling heavy batteries back and forth. Only battery enthusiasts are willing to do every inconvenient thing, to keep their dream alive.”

Other readers complained about how lithium ion batteries lose their charge and don’t store easily. They will have to be continually recharged, which of course requires electricity.

In short, the swappable electric scooter is no sure thing. There are plenty of obstacles that will make it difficult to catch on. But it’s definitely a step in the right direction in making people more accepting of modes of transportation other than imported gasoline.

(Photo credit: Gogoro)

Arctic Leaf

Tesla going full speed ahead, but it has competition

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Shrugging off any concern about falling gas prices, Tesla is planning to have its medium-priced Model III on the road by 2017. If it meets with anything like the reception of the 2014 Model S, Tesla will be in good shape.

Auto reviewers were ecstatic about the Model S, saying it put Tesla in a class by itself. As Ali Aslani wrote on MasterHerald.com:

If you think electric cars are slow and wretched creatures, you obviously haven’t seen the 2014 Tesla Model S. This vehicle is a beast on wheels that will make you forget half your life’s problems, until you look down at the dash and remember that you cannot pull up to a gas station for refueling, once you run out.

That refueling is becoming less and less common, however, as Tesla’s battery technology has pushed the range for its vehicles to 400 km, or 250 miles. It’s enough for a good commute to work. And recharging stations are becoming more common as Tesla and other auto manufacturers push to have them installed.

What really turns on car enthusiasts, however, is the acceleration possible with an electric motor. Alex Kerston posted a video on CarThrottle.com, in which a user who normally drives a Lamborghini Aventador has just ridden in the 691-hp Model S P85D:

The acceleration is ridiculous. I daily drive an Aventador and I thought I got used to fast acceleration. But no. … As a passenger, you do not get a chance to get ready for it at all. My internal organs were glued to the back of my body. … after about a dozen of those 0-60 accelerations, I felt like I had to puke – probably the first time I’ve felt this way in many years.

The question is, is this the kind of performance ordinary drivers are looking for? The Model III will weigh 1,000 pounds more than the Model S and therefore won’t be in the same class as the roadsters. But at $35,000 to $50,000, it will still be in the higher class of buyers. With all the inconveniences of recharging and being a first mover in the electric field, it will be a wonder if the Tesla standard model will be able to reach the 500,000 sales mark at which the company is aiming.

Meanwhile, other auto manufacturers are not standing still. Last week, Volkswagen, the largest auto company in the world, reportedly bought a stake in the Silicon Valley battery manufacturer QuantumScape, which gives VW access to a technology that could potentially deliver far more range that Tesla’s 400 km. QuantumScape’s solid-state batteries also carry a smaller risk of fire than the lithium-ion batteries used in many electric vehicles, including Tesla’s. Hybrid technology leader Toyota has been developing comparable technology since at least 2010, and EV leader Nissan has been promising similar developments. By the time Tesla comes to market with its lithium-ion-driven Model III, it could end up looking downright conservative in its technology.

Volkswagen’s investment in solid-state batteries is especially interesting, since at one point it was actually copying Tesla’s approach to EV battery technology. In 2009 and 2010, Volkswagen was working with Tesla co-founder Marin Eberhard on Tesla’s cylindrical-style lithium batteries but rejected the technology as too complex when it brought the e-Golf to market. Now Volkswagen is looking to leapfrog Tesla into solid-state technology.

Volkswagen Group is planning a short-term offensive against Tesla. It will bring out the $100,000 electric R8 sports car to compete with the Model S. Also in the works is the forthcoming Q8 crossover coupe. Both cars will be produced by VW’s Audi subsidiary.

Other manufacturers are taking aim at Tesla’s share of the $100,000 electric sports-car market. BMW is likely to add more products to its electric “I” brand and has unveiled an electric powertrain that it’s calling the “Tesla killer.” Porsche, also owned by Volkswagen Group, is said to be planning an electric version of a smaller sedan, code-named the Pajun. Former Tesla investor Mercedes-Benz is also working on an electric version of its flagship S-Class vehicles.

The takeaway is that powerful electric vehicles with a suitable range are no longer going to be a luxury item. If Tesla is successful in breaking through with the Model III, it’s going to be followed quickly by competitors in the same class and perhaps with a different technology.

Fuel Freedom Staff

Author: Dieting is a terrible metaphor for reducing emissions

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Ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Paris later this year, there will be a lot of talk about how nations should apportion the burden of reducing carbon emissions. The richer, more industrialized nations have a lot of ideas about what poorer, still-developing nations should do to grow their economies without polluting the atmosphere too much.

Invariably, we might hear the term “carbon diet” come up, with its emphasis on personal sacrifice and willpower.

It’s a counterproductive metaphor, writes Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.

In a post for Slate, as part of its “Future Tense” initiative, Margonelli writes that the “dieting” analogy is unfair to those developing countries, particularly when the richer ones are dictating the terms:

Most of the world does not need a carbon diet. Three-quarters of the global population uses just 10 percent of the world’s energy, 1 billion people lack access to electricity, and 3 billion cook their food over dung, wood, and charcoal, leading to millions of early deaths. These people are energy starved—and they need a feast, not a diet. People in Angola, Bangladesh, and Cameroon, for example, use about 250 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, while people in the U.S. use 12,246.

She goes on to argue that people in developing countries deserve the chance at economic prosperity, so rich nations should promote innovations to serve the surging energy needs in a cleaner way.

For example:

Consider air conditioning. The world uses a trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity for AC right now, and with urbanization, greater wealth, and warming, it’s projected that amount will increase tenfold by 2050, far outpacing zero-carbon electricity generation. The issue is not whether people in developing countries “should” have air conditioning—what virtue is there in dying in your apartment during a heat wave? It’s how to get it to them. AC is a crucial part of building the knowledge economy employment that will eventually bring down carbon emissions because it increases the productivity of people and computers. Without AC there would be no grand economies in Hong Kong, Atlanta, or Bangalore.

The main reason the “diet” metaphor fails is that it suggests that the world’s problems can be solved by individual willpower.

The real issue with the carbon diet is that it suggests that we can deal with climate change as easily as we might switch to gluten-free pasta and beer, via willpower and careful substitution, when what we’ll really need is some kind of revolution in our thinking and technology.

On top of all that, most diets don’t work in the long term anyway. Which some people, sadly, are about to find out, a few weeks into their well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions.

(Photo: Yao ethnic minority women cook dinner on a smoke-spewing stove in Longji, China, in 2010. Credit: CHEN WS, for Shutterstock.com)

Fuel Freedom Staff

Despite cheap gas, EV sales were strong in 2014

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One narrative for 2014 is that cheap gasoline reduced the incentive for energy-efficient vehicles.

Tell that to all the people who bought electric cars during the calendar year.

With sales data still coming in, it appears certain that U.S. sales of EVs, including both all-electric and plug-in hybrids, surpassed 100,000 units.

That marks the third straight year of sales increases, since the electric vehicles we know today first went on sale in December 2010, according to Green Car Reports. The growth rate won’t come close to 2013, however, when 97,000 EVs were sold, nearly doubling the 2012 total of 53,000.

Nissan is emerging as the sales champion for the year, having moved 30,200 all-electric Leafs, a new U.S. record for an EV. That’s up nearly 34 percent over 2013, when 22,610 Nissan Leafs were sold.

Compare that figure to the Chevy Volt, of which 18,805 were sold — down 19 percent from the previous year, when 23,094 were sold.

According to the Auto Blog, Volt sales really tailed off in December, with just 1,490 units, a 38 percent falloff from the same month in 2013. Nissan sold 3,102 units for the month, up 23 percent from December 2013. The federal government’s $7,500 sweetener might have played a role, as new-car buyers sought to grab that tax savings before the calendar turned.

More Auto Blog:

The Leaf outsold the Volt every month in 2014. The closest gap was 215 units, in February. The biggest was 1,612, in December.

One theory for the Volt slowdown is that potential buyers are waiting for the redesigned 2016 model. Although the car won’t be officially unveiled until the Detroit Auto Show next week, Chevrolet opened the kimono to allow journalists a peek Sunday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Check out stories here, here and here.

What about sales of the Tesla Model S, you ask? The company doesn’t post monthly sales reports, so we’ll have to wait until later in the winter for its annual report. But Inside EVs mentions both Nissan and Tesla “hitting it out of the park” in December.

Inside EVs also has a breakdown of how other anticipated models sold during the year. For instance, Cadillac moved 1,310 units of its plug-in ELR. And BMW moved 6,092 units of the i3, “not bad considering it was only available for 7 full months in the US.”

Also:

Current owners got some good news this month as earlier, long standing issues surrounding the onboard chargers being muted to avoid failure incidents has now been rectified and BMW has a recall/repair bulletin out for owners to now get new units installed. 7.4 kW charges again for everyone!

Fuel Freedom Staff

Bloomberg: Can Brazil get its ethanol mojo back?

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Mac Margolis at BloombergView has a good analysis of Brazil’s ethanol industry, which details how “clever sugar and ethanol makers” have been hamstrung by the country’s bureaucracy.

Some 60 ethanol plants have shuttered this year alone and “blue slips,” Brazil’s unemployment notices, are multiplying: Nearly half of the more than 36,000 industrial jobs erased last month were in the sugar and alcohol industry, reports Valor Economico.

What’s worse, they are victims of the wonks and activist bureaucrats whose good intentions to goose growth and contain inflation have only compounded their troubles. The road to ruin was paved by the government of President Dilma Rousseff, a micro-manager who converted state-run companies into the useful idiots of misguided economics.

The piece notes that ethanol took a back seat to oil after the discovery of a huge cache of oil was found under four miles of sea, sediment and salt in 2007.

To restore the balance, and guard against the volatility of oil prices, Brazil might increase the proportion of ethanol blended into gasoline, as well as increase a gasoline tax.

That won’t make Brazilians happy: They already pay one of every three reais they earn to government. But with pressure on emerging market nations to fight climate change by slashing greenhouse gas emissions, a levy on dirty fuels in favor of cleaner-burning ethanol might draw more sympathy.

Landon Hall

Meet the PUMP players: John Brackett, on a mission to convert gas-guzzling cars

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John Brackett is one of the stars of the Fuel Freedom-produced documentary PUMP, but he’s more than just a pretty mutton-chopped face.

Brackett, an automotive engineer in Colorado who goes by the Twitter handle @Fuelverine, has spent a great deal of time promoting the film, which is now available for pre-order on iTunes.

Brackett specializes in tinkering with gasoline-powered engines — any kind, including vehicles and generators — to make them run on multiple types of fuel. But he’s also on a mission to educate the general public, as well as regulators. Converting one’s car to run on alternative fuels is technically not legal, as is using any fuel not specifically listed in the owner’s manual.

But once the public finds out that replacement fuels like ethanol, methanol and natural gas are not only cheaper but burn cleaner than gasoline, they’ll demand them in the marketplace. And they’ll want to learn how to convert their own cars. As Fuelverine says in PUMP: “That’s the best part about being an American: We don’t like it, we’ll change it.”

Fuel Freedom: Why aren’t all the vehicles rolling off the assembly lines labeled as flex-fuel?

John Brackett: The only reason they were ever flex-fuel in the first place was CAFÉ standards (Corporate Average Fleet Economy). And basically what they said is that, ‘Hey, your 6 miles per gallon Tahoe, since it only burns 15 percent gasoline [running on E85], is a 66 mpg vehicle!’ So your overall average for your fleet went up, and that’s why we only have flex-fuel in the giant V-8s and the V-6s. They very rarely went into the four-cylinders, and when they did, they canceled the model within 1-2 years, or even worse, they made it so you could only buy it if you were a commercial or rental fleet company. The [Chevy] Malibu is my favorite example: They made flex-fuel in 2010 for ’em, but it was only for the commercial or the rental fleets, and you couldn’t buy that four-cylinder from your local dealer. So there was never any incentive for them to actually make it mass-produced, they’re just doing it to hit the CAFÉ credits.

FF: Is it a case of companies only doing something because they have a financial incentive to?

JB: Exactly. I’m not usually a mandate-type person, but the Open Fuel Standard is the right type of mandate to allow competition right now. We just don’t have any options.

FF: What are you most interested in right now?

JB: My main thrust is actually making any engine run off of any fuel. I’ve built generators, I’ve gotten cars running on fuels, I’ve done hydrogen, ethane, methane, propane, butane, ethanol, methanol and gasoline. So my personal interest is being able to tell the computer what to change to run off those other fuels. What blew my mind was that the GM cars, and from what we’re told from several tuners, all the Ford cars since 2005, already have the algorithm in there. They literally turned it off. It’s in there.

FF: Is it possible for a car running on ethanol to get better mileage than gasoline?

JB: Basically, E85 has about 25 to 27 percent less energy in the same volume. So when you drive on the fuel, you would expect to lose that much gas mileage. What we found was that if you were driving on the stock flex-fuel from GM, you lost 25 to 30 percent, exactly what you would expect. When I started doing my tuning, and I would change the spark timing just a little bit – I varied it very small, and I did a lot of runs –and  when I treated the fuel as gasoline or with slight advancement in timing, we only lost 5 to 15 percent of our fuel mileage.

Let’s go to what GM has already done: GM has a 2.0-liter, 4-cylinder, turbocharged engine out for the Buick Regal. That engine makes 5 to 15 percent more power on E85 than regular gasoline, while still getting the same fuel mileage. They have obviously tuned that car, so they have no problems doing it. Now, if we go to what is called direct-injection engines, which are definitely in the future … you can get even more efficiency out of it. You get another 15 to 20 percent efficiency increase by going to direct injection.

FF: If you look at prices of E85 around the country, there’s a big disparity [for example, it’s $2.09 in Iowa and $2.59 in Arizona, according to E85prices.com]. What will it take to get more consistency?

JB: If you have a bad original flex-fuel tune from a factory, you’re going to lose 30-40 percent [in mileage compared with gasoline]. Nobody wants to do that when it’s only 10 to 20 percent cheaper fuel. That’s one of the big reasons we try to use methanol as a big one, because it is so much cheaper, especially on a dollar-per-mile basis. But the ethanol fight, we just need more cars that have it as an option. Until we have that, you’re not going to have that market saturation. So if you think about where the cars are vs. the market, the numbers don’t add up. And that’s why we need every car to have the option to run a flex-fuel — on gasoline or ethanol or methanol, or any combination of them in the same tank.

FF: A constant refrain among the anti-ethanol crowd is that it damages engines.

JB: The biggest thing I like to tell people is, if you start with the first cars: They were all flex-fuel. They stopped being flex-fuel because of Prohibition. We have the materials, we know how to do this, we’ve been doing this for 30 years. Every car made since 2001 or ’02 has E10-compliant components. All the fuel lines, everything. And if you look at the corrosive nature of ethanol, it happens most between E10 and E30, so it’s actually very small blends of ethanol that cause the worst corrosion. But all the cars should already come to the factory with parts that work for it. There shouldn’t be any problem with it.

FF: Tell me about this conversion kit you’re using, by Flex Fuel U.S.

JB: They have the only E85-approved conversion system right now in the United States. What is different about their unit is it plugs into the oxygen sensor, so it reads the exact feedback from the oxygen system. So if it is lean [too much oxygen and not enough fuel], it should adjust. It plugs in line with the injectors as well, the difference being it doesn’t increase the injector pulse for the stock injectors; they add a whole new injector somewhere in the intake system, and flood the system that way. So they’re actually adding additional injectors to it. I’ve talked to the guy several times. Basically, he has to sell the kits for $1,100 to $1,500 right now, because it cost him $4 million to go through the EPA certification process. And that was only for 8 to 10 models. It’s absolutely ridiculous, the hindrance to competition. But he could easily, at mass scale, sell these for $300 to $500.

… We are now at the point where EPA is stopping us from getting clean air. They’re just making things more expensive.

(Photo: John Brackett dropping some knowledge to the assembled in Times Square, September 2014.)