KDF Search Results

Logging and mill residues are currently the largest sources of woody biomass for bioenergy in the US, but short-rotation woody crops (SRWCs) are expected to become a larger contributor to biomass production, primarily on lands marginal for food production. However, there are very few studies on the environmental effects of SRWCs, and most have been conducted at stand rather than at watershed scales.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Co-Optimization (Co-Optima) initiative is accelerating the introduction of affordable, scalable, and sustainable fuels and high-efficiency, low-emission engines with a first-of-its-kind effort to simultaneously tackle fuel and engine research and development (R&D).

The DOE Bioenergy Technologies Office initiated a collaborative research program between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to investigate HOF in late 2013. The program objective was to provide a quantitative picture of the barriers to adoption of HOF and the highly efficient vehicles it enables, and to quantify the potential environmental and economic benefits of the technology.

The Bioenergy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy sponsored a scoping study to assess the potential of ethanolbased
high octane fuel (HOF) to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
HOF blends used in an engine designed for higher octane have the potential to increase vehicle
energy efficiency through improved knock suppression. When the high-octane blend is made
with 25%–40% ethanol by volume, this energy efficiency improvement is potentially sufficient

The United States government has been promoting increased use of biofuels, including ethanol from non-food feedstocks, through policies contained in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The objective is to enhance energy security, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and provide economic benefits. However, the United States has reached the ethanol blend wall, where more ethanol is produced domestically than can be blended into standard gasoline. Nearly all ethanol is blended at 10 volume percent (vol%) in gasoline.

Fact Sheet for High Octane Fuels: Challenges & Opportunities

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is supporting engine and vehicle research to investigate the potential of high-octane fuels to improve fuel economy. Ethanol has very high research octane number (RON) and heat of vaporization (HoV), properties that make it an excellent spark ignition engine fuel. The prospects of increasing both the ethanol content and the octane number of the gasoline pool has the potential to enable improved fuel economy in future vehicles with downsized, downsped engines.

Presentation at 2015 Bioenergy Technologies Office Peer Review March 23, 2015

Presentation at Auto/Ag/Ethanol Meeting USCAR August 18, 2015

Share and discuss provisional findings from coordinated DOE national laboratory studies on the opportunities and challenges associated with the deployment of high octane, mid-level ethanol blend transportation fuels.

Presentation to Hudson Institute Fueling American Growth Washington, DC May 7, 2015

Presentation at National Ethanol Conference Grapevine, TX February 20, 2015

Corn’s (Zea mays L.) stover is a potential nonfood, herbaceous bioenergy feedstock. A vital aspect of utilizing stover for bioenergy production is to establish sustainable harvest criteria that avoid exacerbating soil erosion or degrading soil organic carbon (SOC) levels. Our goal is to empirically estimate the minimum residue return rate required to sustain SOC levels at numerous locations and to identify which macroscale factors affect empirical estimates.

To prepare for a 2014 launch of commercial scale cellulosic ethanol production from corn/maize (Zea mays L.) stover, POET-DSM near Emmetsburg, IA has been working with farmers, researchers, and equipment dealers through “Project Liberty” on harvest, transportation, and storage logistics of corn stover for the past several years. Our objective was to evaluate seven stover harvest strategies within a 50-ha (125 acres) site on very deep, moderately well to poorly drained Mollisols, developed in calcareous glacial till.

This project looks at the potential of blending ethanol with natural gasoline to produce Flex-Fuels (ASTM D5798-13a) and high-octane, mid-level ethanol blends. Eight natural gasoline samples were collected from pipeline companies or ethanol producers around the United States.

The objective of this work was to measure knock resistance metrics for ethanol-hydrocarbon blends with a primary focus on development of methods to  measure the heat of vaporization (HOV). Blends of ethanol at 10 to 50 volume percent were prepared with three gasoline blendstocks and a natural gasoline.

High-octane fuels (HOFs) such as mid-level ethanol blends can be leveraged to design vehicles with increased engine efficiency, but producing these fuels at refineries may be subject to energy efficiency penalties.  It has been questioned whether, on a well-to-wheels (WTW) basis, the use of HOFs in the vehicles designed for HOF has net greenhouse gas (GHG) emission benefits.

This report evaluates infrastructure implications for a high-octane fuel, i.e., a blend of 25% denatured ethanol and 75% gasoline (E25) or higher (E25+), for use with a new high-efficiency type of vehicle. E25+ is under consideration due to federal regulations requiring the use of more renewable fuels and improvements in fuel economy. The existing transportation fuel infrastructure may not be completely compatible with a mid-level ethanol blend (blends above E15 up to E50).

The compatibility of plastic materials used in fuel storage and dispensing applications was determined for an off-highway diesel fuel
and a blend containing 20% bio-oil (Bio20) derived from a fast pyrolysis process. Bio20 is not to be confused with B20, which is a
diesel blend containing 20% biodiesel. The feedstock, processing, and chemistry of biodiesel are markedly different from bio-oil.
Plastic materials included those identified for use as seals, coatings, piping and fiberglass resins, but many are also used in vehicle

The compatibility of plastic materials used in fuel storage and dispensing applications was determined for a test fuel representing
gasoline blended with 10% ethanol. Prior investigations were performed on gasoline fuels containing 25, 50 and 85% ethanol, but the
knowledge gap existing from 0 to 25% ethanol precluded accurate compatibility assessment of low level blends, especially for the
current E10 fuel (gasoline containing 10% ethanol) used in most filling stations, and the recently accepted E15 fuel blend (gasoline
blended with up to15% ethanol).