"Fueling the Future"-Ethanol Boost
Thursday, May 17, 2007SUSIE GHARIB: Today Toyota started selling the world's most expensive hybrid vehicle. It's a Lexus sedan with a price tag of $124,000. Its gasoline and electric engine can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in under six seconds and gets almost 29 miles to a gallon. Stretching gas mileage is the aim of many auto makers these days and a goal for others as well. Tonight as we wrap up our series "Fueling the Future", reporter Jonathan Silvers looks at how gasoline and ethanol are driving the technology for change.
JONATHAN SILVERS, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Homestead Miami speedway is better known for fast and furious competition than for environmental activism. That changed in March when cellulistic ethanol began propelling this year's indy car series, the only motor sport to use a renewable homegrown fuel. Bobby Rahal is co-owner of Rahal Letterman racing and a motor sports hall of fame inductee. He has experimented with alternative fuels for decades.
BOBBY RAHAL, RAHAL LETTERMAN RACING: Ethanol is never going to replace gasoline, because you can't produce enough of it. But you can begin to dilute a gallon of gasoline with ethanol and still have the same benefits, in fact, increased benefits but the big thing, it's the infrastructure that holds it back.
SILVERS: All the teams in this indy car series get an unlimited supply of fuel from the ethanol industry, free of charge. In contrast, ordinary drivers of the three million flex fuel vehicles sold in the U.S. have a hard time finding ethanol for purchase, let alone for free. They can run on a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, but most make do with the standard fuel pump blend of 10 percent ethanol. When he's not on the racetrack, Rahal can usually be found at one of his car dealerships. He's chairman of an automotive group that runs 14 of them, all foreign. Given his competitive nature, it should surprise no one that his Honda dealership in western Pennsylvania is among the most successful in the country. The products' virtues, like its fuel economy, make for an easy sell.
RAHAL: Well, I think again you have to look at the environment in which each of these manufacturers has grown within and operated. In Europe and in Japan, fuel consumption has always been a front-burner issue. Here in this country, gasoline's been very, very cheap, compared to the rest of the world. So the necessity is perceived by the buying public and the manufacturers themselves is that they didn't have to develop systems that would give you 10 miles per gallon more. It's not that that technology wasn't known or wasn't available; it just was never considered a necessity here as it is in the rest of the world. I hope that philosophy changes; I think it has to change, because life as we know it, as we've come to appreciate, isn't going to continue at the same level that we have. Because when we don't have the ability to just jump in the car and go, because of the cost aspect, there's going to be a lot of unhappy people in this country.
SILVERS: Some of those unhappy people are motivated to search for solutions -- like Dan Cohn, an MIT fission physicist who drives a GMC Yukon. Cohn helped invent a revolutionary engine technology called ethanol boost. So, your work on engines was inspired by your low fuel mileage in this vehicle?
DAN COHN, FISSION PHYSICIST, MIT: No, I have to say it's inspired more by the large need I perceive for more fuel efficient vehicles and saving oil and reducing greenhouse gases.
SILVERS: With two colleagues at MIT, Cohn devised a system that injects small amounts of ethanol into a gasoline engine to produce more torque.
COHN: By being able to operate at a much higher level of torque and power in a given size engine, it's possible to achieve the same power that you would have in a large engine in a much smaller engine.
SILVERS: When computer models predicted the system would improve fuel efficiency by 30 percent, the scientists formed a start-up company last year and began collaborating with an established auto maker. Testing is underway at Ford and early results are consistent with computer predictions: fuel efficiency increases by 25 percent. The downside, a test vehicle won't hit the road for at least three years, but the potential impact is enormous.
COHN: We're just interested in this problem and able to pursue it. Well, I think the greatest satisfaction will come if it actually turned into a practical technology that has an impact. That's the most important thing to us.
SILVERS: And important to the hundred million American drivers who are paying a high price while the auto industry is working on fueling the future. Jonathan Silvers, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT.
GHARIB: You can see more of Jonathan Silvers' reporting on fuel technology tomorrow night on the PBS program "Now". Check your local listings for times in your area.
