Ethanol, Biodiesel, CNG and Propane Reality Check: Live from the Alternative Fuels and Vehicles Conference

This week was the 15th Annual Alternate Fuels and Vehicles Conference, held at the Dolphin Convention Center, Disney World. But no one appears to have told the army of grounds keepers with two-stroke string trimmers, the diesel-powered shuttle-boat captains ferrying clutches of grade schoolers over to the Magic Kingdom, or even the Avis rep who gave me a smoking-good offer on a full-size Lincoln Town Car. Of course, none of these folks—me included—are running on alternate fuels. Yet. But that's likely soon to change. After two days of dawn-to-dusk seminars, a convention hall full of exhibitors, and a parking lot full of vehicles powered by all manner of fuels, we got a sense of where five alternative fuels stand in the minds of the anything-but-oil insiders.
Photo by N. Beckerman/Getty Images


We create a lot of ethanol in this country, and most of it goes into our cars. Seventy percent of the gasoline sold in the U.S. has 10 percent ethanol--E10. This practice began when the petroleum companies needed to replace the oxygen-bearing MTBE and ETBE added to improve air quality. When MTBE started showing up in the groundwater, probably from leaking gasoline-storage tanks, alcohol was the logical choice. When gasoline prices took a periodic spike and the government started to subsidize corn-based ethanol production, it really took off. Add in the fact that car manufacturers took advantage of a CAFE exemption for building flex-fuel cars, and built a lot of flex-fuel vehicles that can run on E85, pure gasoline or any mix of the two, and suddenly you have ethanol representing a substantial portion of the automotive fuel consumed in the U.S. How much? Enough to replace all of the crude we import from Saudi Arabia or any other single foreign country except Canada.

On the horizon: Cellulosic ethanol. Poet Energy spokesman Doug Berven explained that his company is ready to open an ethanol plant that will make the fuel using two different methods. First the plant will ferment the corn and distill it, just like moonshiners did. Then they'll take the corncobs, grind them up, treat them with enzymes to change the cellulose into starch and then into sugar, which leaves them with a sweet solution that can be fermented and distilled. This process, if it can be made economical, stands to create an enormous amount of ethanol motor fuel from grass clippings, wood chips, scrap paper and even municipal garbage.

Compressed Natural Gas

The CNG people still haven't gotten enough infrastructure together to make any real inroads to the consumer market. There are plenty of CNG fleets out there, but out-the-door CNG customers don't have much of a chance of making a cross-country trip without a lot of planning to meander from one CNG source to another. Yet CNG is a serious option. Honda is one of the few vehicle manufacturers that have embraced the fuel--you can buy a CNG-powered Civic GX right now and get 36 mpg highway gasoline gallon equivalent (GGE). Not bad.


Propane, unlike most of the other technologies featured at this conference, is here now. Propane is available within a few miles of just about anywhere, thanks to millions of barbecue grills running on the stuff. There's plenty of it, it's easier to compress than CNG and it's cheap. Why it isn't as popular as a motor fuel here in the USA is surprising. Jack Roush's company, Roush Performance, is jumping into propane. Yes, the same Roush that builds NASCAR racers and tuner Mustangs. The company is building dealer-installed kits to turn your Ford F-150, 250, 350 or equivalent E-series van into a dedicated propane vehicle. We drove one, briefly. From the driver's seat, it's impossible to tell it's not powered by gasoline. The kit doesn't void the Ford warranty, either.


Biodiesel is simply diesel fuel derived from nonmineral feedstocks, and most people who haven't been paying attention tend to confuse this with cars and trucks that have been modified to run on old French-fry oil. True biodiesel is processed chemically, and for the most part, can be used in any diesel engine, at least if it's blended into regular diesel at low concentrations. One problem early adopters of biodiesel have found is inconsistent quality. As the biodiesel industry matures, quality will be less of a problem. Fleet managers are finding out how to blend and treat biodiesel to avoid problems like the fuel tanks filling with waxy flakes that clog the filters on cold days, and dealing with biodiesel's ability to chase every bit of contamination in a fuel tank up off the bottom and into the filter. We discussed the subject with Fred Tennant of Petro Algae. The company is currently nearing production of a biodiesel-producing system that grows oil-rich (35 percent) algae in outdoor tanks. The oil is extracted and processed into biodiesel by conventional processes. They reuse most of the water too.

But the highlight of the show for me was listening to Tony Petelos, the mayor of Hoover, Ala. Last year, he set up a program to collect used frying oil from small restaurants and households by simply dropping it off at local firehouses. He bought the city a small-scale biodiesel processing plant for around $25,000 and installed it in a maintenance garage. There city workers made biodiesel for running garbage trucks, downtown trolleys and other city-owned vehicles. Payback time on the investment: 202 days. Banking on that success, he then started shipping waste wood, collected by the city DPW from trees that fall on city streets, and shipped it off to a plant that makes cellulosic ethanol, which is then used to fuel the city's flex-fuel police cars. Tony tells of being asked by a constituent if he thought it was appropriate to ship wood and alcohol back and forth a hundred miles. To which he countered that it seemed a better idea than shipping crude oil 7800 miles from the Middle East.

(Photo by N. Beckerman/Getty Images)
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