Below is the text version of the Co-Optima Capstone webinar, “Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines—Past, Present, and Future: What did we learn and where do we go next?” Watch the webinar recording.

[Begin audio]

Daniel Gaspar: Well, welcome everyone this morning or this afternoon, depending on your time zone. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to our final Co-Optima capstone webinar. This is the sixth in a series, and we'll show them to you in just a minute. The title of this webinar is "Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines: Past, Present, and Future – What did we learn and where do we go next?" My name is Dan Gaspar, I'm a manager at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I've been involved with Co-Optima for about six years, and I've been leading the overall effort for the last year. I'm joined by Robert Wagner, who is currently division director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Robert holds the distinction of being the only leadership team member who saw this thing through from its conception to its finish. So Robert led the overall program for two years and has kindly agreed to stay on with us until we finish up. Next slide, please.

So as you'll hear in a minute, this is a large effort that really represents the collective work of more than 200 researchers from around the nation, and this work has been presented, and summarized really, in this capstone series. We started in March with light‑duty, and April moved to medium- and heavy-duty, and then May and June talked about some of the analysis results for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty, and then in August, Magnus Sjöberg gave us a really nice summary of what some of the advanced combustion activities within Co-Optima have led to. So we'll summarize the overall program in this webinar, and if you want more detail, or to view any of the recordings, you can find them at the link below and you'll get more detail from those. So with that, I'll turn it over to Robert to start us off.

Robert Wagner: All right. Thank you, Dan. Okay, we're going to tell a bit of a story today on where we started, and where we are at the moment, and where do we go from here, and I'll cover a lot of the history and where we started, and basically give a little bit of a summary on where we are now, and then Dan will really get into the details and where we go from here. And when we started this, it was really about combining engine and fuel R&D in a little more intentional manner. And this is back in 2014 when we first started this, and Ernie Moniz was the head of Department of Energy. I'm sure you all remember Ernie, he's quite the scientist, very inspirational kind of person who really wanted to see impact, and I really believe his leadership led to this. We were really motivated by the Dewey Quadrennial Technology Review, and I'm not sure how many of you have looked at this, but even though the original is 2011, so it's been a decade now – it's worth looking at. It really was an interesting document. I remember being involved in some of the meetings that led to it.

There's this one statement and it really motivated us at the time; I still think it motivates a lot of what is being done now: "It's reliance on oil that's the greatest immediate threat to the U.S. economic national security, and also contributes to the long-term threat of climate change." And this was really getting at – Are there other ways to do this than to rely solely on oil? So then, that same year, 2014, there was a DOE Big Idea Summit. These summits, they were really fun to participate in because they were sort of designed to bring the labs together around big ideas that they all had shared interest in and believed in, and then present these ideas. And they were discussed, and some made it to a funded stage in an actual initiative like ours, and some of course didn't or they evolved after the summit.

So 2014, March, this topic was part of, actually, a little bit bigger presentation, and then it was presented again a bit after that. Anyway, a lot of iteration, a lot of engagement across the labs and it led to something, it came to be. I mentioned earlier, we were trying to really make a difference on how we did research, and the idea was to accelerate innovation and increase transportation sustainability; it was about bringing together the unique expertise across the laboratories, across a couple offices, to take this problem on together. We had worked across the labs a bit before, but never so intentionally, and that's what we were trying to do. And then, I think you know by now, we're looking for fuel/engine combinations and options that would help us with efficiency and emissions, but we were looking at it all together.

And these were the labs that were involved throughout the whole process, there was nine national laboratories, two offices at DOE, and I'm not going to walk through all the labs, but I'll point out a few of the labs just to show some of the uniqueness. So Sandia, of course, was doing a lot with optical engines, fundamental combustion sprays. Argonne was doing spray work, high-performance computing. We were doing high-performance computing work; Lawrence Livermore, kinetics; so you can walk through all these different labs and see these really unique capabilities in, not only the vehicle technology space, but also in the bioenergy technology space.

So how do you bring all this together? That was the challenge, and I apologize, I'm not going to walk through all the labs. It would be fun to actually do a discussion of all the unique pieces that were brought together, but truly it was an interesting time. Also, from the standpoint of – we were always collegial when we did some things together. The labs had never really come together quite like this, where we're sharing thoughts openly and trying to look for opportunities to work together, even if we had some overlap, we had to manage that. And if you were on at the start of the meeting, I held up to Dan to remind him a sign I made back in the early days, it said, "Keep calm and optimize on," and that's because there was a lot of angst in the early days, so we all tried to keep level heads when we brought this together.

So we also, at that point, we came together, but then – we wanted to be impactful. In fact, in the early days, we had a market transformation team focused on that – How do we move things along? So we engaged with the stakeholders. We had a lot of what we called listening days, and we would have people from just across the board that we viewed as stakeholders or people that showed interest. Many face-to-face meetings, and then also several of  us, actually different groups of people, went out and visited companies at their home place and talked about this and tried to get their input, and we had a lot of great input from that. I don't remember what the final count was of how many different companies we visited, but it was really an important part of setting the path where we needed to be, and you can imagine we had to reconcile different interests. I remember at some of these early stakeholder meetings when you would have an OEM sitting there and a person from an energy company, and they had very different views on who should be responsible for what, so we worked together, and we reconciled some of these things for the best path forward.

And what came out of that was a focus initially on different combustion modes – is how we organized. So we had a Thrust 1, which is around spark-ignition combustion. So think about boosted spark-ignition, things like that. So a little bit of work was planned in that space, and then what we call Thrust II, which was a much broader area around advanced compression-ignition, and this was everything from running in a mixing-controlled mode like a diesel engine, to partially pre-mixed modes, to all the way down to homogeneous compression-ignition type approaches and everything in between. So that's how we focused, and that ended up getting reworked after maybe a year, and I'm going to come back to that in one more slide.

And then we also worked with industry and DOE to define the scope. We couldn't just do everything, and at the time, we were settling in on what budgets might look like, and on average, this was roughly, I'll say rough numbers – $25 million a year effort. It was a little bit less than that on average; the original vision was much bigger than that. So anyway, we scoped it to fit that, and I want to walk through these really quickly; it's important to know where we were at, and then also this would be important as Dan starts talking through some more detailed outcomes. So we focused only on liquid fuels. It's a question we got a lot over the years about gaseous fuels, but that’s kind of where we drew our line for liquid fuels. We were looking at blendstocks up to 30 percent by volume into a petroleum base, which seemed incredibly aggressive at the time, and keep in mind, this was only in 2014-2015.

We wanted to identify fuel properties that optimized engine performance independent of composition. That's really an important statement, and that was one of our fundamental hypothesis around this as we started this initiative. Non-food-based biofuels – we wanted to look at well-to-wheel emissions, so we weren't going to just look at tailpipe, we wanted to look at the whole thing, hybridized and non-hybridized powertrain solutions. The important part there is for hybridized, maybe the duty cycle's a little bit different, and at the end we also wanted to be able to provide data, tools, and knowledge that would be a value to the stakeholders. We didn't want this just to be some academic exercise that went on a shelf, and no one was able to take advantage of, and that was also our motivation for staying very engaged with stakeholders throughout this; and to that end, we also had an external advisory board that was with us from the beginning. It included a lot of very well-known people representing very well-known areas, and it was really important to where we ended up in the end.

So I mentioned the structure was reworked, and this was based on industry input. So again, the original was around what we called Thrust I and Thrust II, which were different combustion modes, and there was feedback to DOE and the Co-Optima team in general, that we should structure it a little bit different, and this is how we ended up. So this was probably around near the end of year one, we changed to this approach. So light-duty, we had a near-term, which was boosted SI combustion, and then longer-term, which was looking at different types of advanced compression-ignition with boosted SI, what we called multimode, and the whole idea here was we can get the high efficiency and higher load with boosted SI, but what can we do with part load to pull up efficiency, and that's where these ACI approaches came in.

In the medium-/heavy-duty space, we had a near term, more conventional diesel combustion. Think of it that way, so mixing-controlled compression-ignition – what can we do with fuel chemistry here? And then longer term was also this ACI-type approach, where there were other opportunities around emissions and efficiency and possibly even multimode solutions as well. So we really changed structure, and I really think this helped us focus a little bit more, especially when you're thinking about impact and how this might transition out and be a value to industry and other stakeholders.

So on the efficiency side, we're targeting a 10 percent improvement based on potential for higher efficiency, and we were motivated by this information that's here on the right. This came from Scott Sluder, and basically, it's a simple figure, but it shows that at higher RON numbers there's opportunity for higher peak load, higher peak efficiency, so it's really as simple as that, so that was a bit of a motivator. In the medium- and heavy-duty space, we're looking for at least diesel-like efficiency, but with lower emissions. The one thing we really heard from the heavy-duty industry was the challenges of NOx under low-load conditions, so you think of a bus drive cycle or things like that. So there were things that we could do to still keep the diesel-like efficiency, even improve it, but reduce some of the emissions burden, or reduce emissions in conditions where emission controls just don't work, maybe they're not warm enough.

And then we also thought about reducing the greenhouse gas, that was also part of this. So that was pretty broad, so we ended up spending most of our time, of course, in the biofuels area. Early on we did talk about low-carbon petroleum-derived fuel, so things you can do with greenhouse gas mitigation for the petroleum drive fuels as well.

So I mentioned earlier, we were looking at potential for 30 percent reduction, and this was a figure we used really early on that I thought was interesting and worth including here. So if you look at the vertical axis, the idea is reducing vehicle energy consumption, of course that's going to help with overall greenhouse gas, and then can you reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of the energy source? And we have a business-as-usual approach here, and then where we hope to be in 2030. I'm trying to remember, actually, what NFVSO stands for, that was even before Optima, which became Co-Optima, so there is a lot of iterations in the early days of the name.

And you can also think about sort of bookend cases here, which we didn't really get into, but imagine a case where, say engine efficiency is actually a little bit worse, but the greenhouse gas intensity and energy source for that fuel is so low that it makes it a net win on well-to-wheels, so there's a lot of space here to work in. And just a simple – this is from an early presentation, too – a simple representation what all this might look like as we go out in time. The idea was that there was going to be some improvements already from business as usual and we wanted to do better than that, and then we were going to have displacement through these types of fuels, and you notice the Optima name here instead of Co-Optima, because that was changed at one point as well for kind of interesting reasons, but not good for this discussion.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, we're looking at 30 percent, and it was very aggressive at the time, and now we look back and we don't think it's very aggressive at all, but at the time it was. And this is just another representation of how we thought all of this might come together for further out, sort of 2050 target. We were contributing through fuels and engine optimization, but then there were other technologies we expected to come online over the years.

Okay so I showed this earlier, this was the original team, nine labs, and one thing we learned as we went is we needed some more partnerships, and there were maybe some gaps in our capabilities, or our bandwidth even. And also, there was a lot of interest from industry, so were there ways to engage with them? And that's what we did, was through competitive solicitations, this team increased dramatically over these years, and it's a really big team. I think it's been just great, because we've learned a lot from each other, we've been able to bring in some other expertise that we maybe didn't have enough depth or bandwidth in the labs, industry input, so this has been really great. I'm amazed when I look at this figure on how much this team grew in six years.

The timeline and objectives also changed from the original plan. We originally had a 10‑year plan, and you can see this is, again, one of the early timelines we put together, where we're hoping to start transitioning things to market, which we all know is really, really hard. I think we were overly optimistic, perhaps even a little naïve. It's a learning process as we go, and our external advisory board was great at helping ground us and understand really what some of these things took. But anyway, we decided to accelerate it, to the encouragement of DOE and others, REAB, we went to a six-year timeline, which was two three-year phases, and we really de-emphasized that path to market and focused a bit more on science. And that was kind of a trend as well in DOE at the time – to really focus on the fundamentals and the things that are going to help industry, and that path to market would really be handled by industry and others, although we certainly would contribute, provide them the right data as much as possible.

So it changed to six years, and that brings us to today. We're at the end, in fact, this is the last day of the fiscal year for the laboratories and DOE, so the timing of this was perfect.  I imagine that's why Dan picked this day. I don't remember him saying that, but I'm sure that's why we're doing this today. So some of the key takeaways: How did we do? So on a high-level – I'll go through high-level then I'll pass to Dan, and he's got a great set of slides to dig into this and give you a high-level summary, but it's more technical, hits some of the important points.

Light-duty, 10 percent fuel economy gain over 2015 baseline and potential for additional gain over multimode approaches. So this was a combination of experimental data, but then also modeling. So we didn’t build a car, we didn't design and completely rebuild an engine, those are way beyond the scope of what we would be able to even do. But anyway, we certainly characterized the opportunity here, we demonstrated at least on research-type engines. There was a merit function that was originally led by Paul Miles to tie fuel properties to fuel economy. I think this was really important, not only to what we did in boosted SI, but even our thinking overall as we carried on through the rest of the initiative, it really grounded us into some new thought processes. And then there's a report out there on the top 10 sustainable blendstock options in this space, and Dan led this report. Hopefully, we'll have a link to it somewhere, it's a really nice report and I'd encourage you to check it out.

Medium- to heavy-duty, we looked at potentially lower cost paths to reduce engine-out criteria emissions, so as I mentioned – Are there things we can do, I'll say under low‑temperature-type conditions, where the emissions controls don't work? Are there other opportunities due to the fuel chemistry? There's another report that Dan also led (he was very busy) on 13 sustainable blendstock options in this space, and it's, again, it's out there for download.

And then looking at ACI-type approaches, we did see where there was a potential for a 4 percent fuel economy gain, and again, I want to emphasize that we're not building specific engines necessarily, but we're showing the potential of this through experiments where it looks like these are options and possibilities going forward. And then we had a lot of crosscutting work, and by that we mean it was relevant to light-duty work and the medium- and heavy-duty work, and this is really where a lot of the, I'll say understanding the LCA, TEA, other things like that. And you'll see down there we found blendstock options to help with reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Looked at economic drivers – So how do these things look from that standpoint, particularly from adoption?

I mentioned this earlier, but new tools and stimulation approaches, they really crosscut all of this. A lot of really interesting tools came together, fuel property database, and all these are available to you, so there's good references to them on our website, which I think there is a link for later, and if there's something you're interested in looking for and have questions, you can always reach out – we're happy to help you. And then there was a really interesting screening methodology. So you have all these fuel potentials, and how do you, at least, do the different levels of screening as you decide where to focus and spend your time? Resources are limited, times are limited, so as much screening as you can do on the front end is going to be beneficial, so we came a long way in that space as well. Even from the very early days, figured out how to look at micro-liter amounts to computational approaches. So again, all these – we looked at a lot of things over the years, and we've settled on some really good approaches.

So with that, I'm going to pass on to Dan, and he'll be going into notable outcomes and talking about this in a little bit more detail. So Dan, I'm going to hand off.

Daniel Gaspar: So thanks, and that was a great summary of where Co-Optima started and started to get at where we ended up. So it's mostly about outcomes that fit into three buckets. The first one is about the biofuels, or sustainable blendstocks that could be produced from waste or biomass. Second one is about how we might change energy and emissions. As Robert said, we don't build engines – we provide research outcomes, knowledge, data, tools, so that market actors, who actually are experienced in doing that, would build engines.

So we'll talk a little bit about how fuel property changes could be utilized in an engine to improve efficiency; and then finally, we'll talk a little bit about how these advanced engines and biofuels could reduce emissions – greenhouse gas emissions, and particularly in the case of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, criteria pollutants such as nitrogen oxides or particulate matter. We'll go through, first, the light-duty, and then we'll shift to the medium- and heavy-duty. Next slide, please.

Okay, so this is going to come through, so Robert, go ahead and advance all the way through the animation. So Robert introduced this concept of the merit function. And there's a really great paper that Jim Szybist pulled together with a large group of collaborators from across the program that describes how we got to this merit function, what it means, and how the terms were derived. You don't have to do the math here, I think the most important takeaway for those of you who aren't going to use it to actually go compute the merit function score for a given fuel is to understand that there are really three different fuel properties that dominant the size of the merit function score for a given fuel. One is related to the auto-ignition propensity, or the research octane number. It's measured on a kind of engine, and you don't need to know the details, but if you want them, they're in a number of publications including this Pex article. There's also a really nice article by Jim and some of his collaborators called "The History of Octane," and you can find that also on our publications database that I'll point you to at the end.

So that research octane number is a key fuel property, and second one is octane sensitivity, and that's the difference between the auto-ignition propensity at two different engine conditions: temperature and pressure conditions, and that tells essentially how the auto-ignition of that fuel is going to change with engine conditions. The third one is something called heat of vaporization, this is a physical property of the fuel, and it effects how the fuel [inaudible due to interference] at the very beginning, as well as in the end gas, so you get something called a charge-cooling effect, and there's some other impacts as well. In fact, this team did a really great job at teasing out what those different impacts are.

So there are some other fuel properties that we looked at as we expected them to have some impact on the potential efficiency, things like flame speed, incomplete combustion, at least of particulate matter, and some others. And ultimately, we ended up with [inaudible due to interference] having the largest impact on the potential for improved performance. Next slide, please.

So as I said, we're really talking about how we couple those fuel properties to a quantitative measure [inaudible due to interference] potential fuel economy over a drive cycle. So, increased RON and S allow you to increase the pressure in the cylinder during the compression stroke without getting auto-ignition, so therefore, you can go to a higher compression ratio, and that allows you to increase the engine efficiency at peak load. So you can see all along the top from left to right, the left-hand side, that would be a market, regular gasoline – 91 RON, roughly 8S, and for a baseline compression ratio of just under 10, I think represents an on-road vehicle today. If you increase the RON to something like premium, which would be the second one to the right – so 95 RON, an S of eight, so the [inaudible due to interference] octane number at the pump would be 91 in that case, you can get a little bit of improvement; going up you can get significantly increased improvement with higher compression ratios.

So on the right, that's where we identified technology options with 102 RON and S=12, compression ratio of 15, that could give you a 10 percent improvement in fuel economy over the drive cycle. So that was the first, I would say, option that we identified to meet that 10 percent efficiency improvement. So let's go to the next slide.

So how would you generate that high RON, that high S? There are a number of options; these are the options that we identified that could do so at the lowest blend level, essentially. So these all have high merit function scores compared to a regular gasoline baseline, and it turns out these all blend something [inaudible due to interference] realistically. So if you were to blend these by volume, you get more bang for your buck, literally, actually less auto-ignition propensity then you would get, just expect, from a linear blending rule. So out of these ten, you can see a couple of exotic molecules on the right, this mixture of furans and the cyclopentanone. On the left, you see a series of alcohols in an [inaudible due to interference], and then a blend that comes from a particular production process, and then di-isobutylene, which is an alkene molecule that can be generated in a couple of different ways. So if you'd go to the next slide, please.

So that means that out of those ten, a couple of them may be much more challenging to get to the market. So we screened hundreds, more than 400 blendstocks from a number of different sources, looking for those that provide that highest merit function score, and of those 400 or so, these six we think have the highest potential, the lowest barrier to entry, and it's pretty straight forward. If you look at at least a couple of them, so ethanol is in the marketplace now, and so we know a lot about how it behaves in an engine. Isobutanol is [inaudible due to interference] for use in market fuels, and di-isobutylene is chemically similar to some components in [inaudible due to interference] now and could be introduced into the marketplace in a fairly straightforward way.

The others are close enough chemically that we think they also could be introduced with less effort than [inaudible due to interference] that are chemically very different. It kind of pulls together the chemistry of the fuel and how we would use those in an engine for light-duty. Next slide, please.

But if we want to go to [inaudible due to interference] base-market engines – so those are for turbo-charged spark-ignited engine, one [inaudible due to interference] spark plugs – if we want to go beyond that to this multimode approach, we could get even higher efficiency. So Robert introduced this topic, where we would go under part load, where the engine is not running pedal to the metal, you don't have high load, you will do something to increase the efficiency of that part of the drive cycle as well.

So through a combination of experimental results and modeling, the Co-Optima team has demonstrated that – actually go ahead and advance the slide – that with some changes to the compression ratio and to using this multimode operation, that we can actually get to that 10 percent with less aggressive property changes. So lower RON and S, and still get to that 10 percent gain, or we could get a much higher gain of an additional, somewhere around 9 to 14 percent, economy benefit. For details, I would refer you back to Magnus' August capstone webinar, it's got a really nice description of all of this work. Next slide, please.

So then we've also looked at a number of different ways to analyze how these new fuels might get into the marketplace, how the engines might be adopted by consumers, and then what kind of benefits we might be able to derive from that. So this picture here from Magdalena at Idaho National Laboratory does a really nice job of depicting how you might be able to increase the [inaudible due to interference] to a refiner and to the consumer by introducing some of the bio-blendstocks into the mix. Her modeling suggests that you could increase the outcome [inaudible due to interference] higher profit margin products, like solvents, or [inaudible due to interference]. At the same time as [inaudible due to interference] the quality of the gas that would be put into a pipeline, the gasoline that would be put into a pipeline, and with that lower greenhouse gas emissions. So this would be part of a transition strategy that one could use to both increase the sustainable content of our fuel system and do so at a cost that we can bear. So next slide, please.

Okay, so shifting gears to medium- and heavy-duty. As Robert indicated, we screened thousands of potential blendstocks using a combination of small-volume testing approaches and computational approaches. As an aside, we got better as we did this; we started with more focus on the light-duty, and as we shifted to the medium- and heavy‑duty, we were able to use these tiered-screening processes to look at a larger number of potential [inaudible due to interference] fuels. Ultimately, we determined that these 13 have the most promise to maintain [inaudible due to interference], reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and also reduce criteria pollutant emissions.

So you can see they fall into roughly three bins. The top bin are all hydrocarbons, a couple of which are approved for use in fuel today, here and around the world. Renewable diesel on the lower right is part of our market fuel system right now, Fischer‑Tropsch diesel under some conditions is also in use elsewhere. So those are fuels that could essentially be drop-in kinds of fuels that could be introduced with minimal impact.

The next row down are esters, so these an ester functionality, it's a C double [inaudible due to interference], and that carbon is also bound to another oxygen that has a hydrocarbon group on the other side. Biodiesel, which is in the marketplace now, fatty acid methyl esters in the middle there, certainly makes this list. And the use of biodiesel up to B5 or B10 (5 or 10 percent by volume) is certainly something that our fuel system can bear. There are some barriers to use at high-blend levels, so we put this in kind of a middle tier, where going to a full replacement would require some additional work. Then, third, ethers, and ethers are much more exotic; these have been known for a long time to have very high CT numbers in some cases, but they also have the potential for really [inaudible due to interference] reductions and soot production in cylinder, and because of that, we can change engine operation to reduce NOx as well. So next slide, please.

So in fact, we didn’t just look at these in doing fuel property testing. These were some experiments that were done by Bob McCormick and his team at NREL in a conventional diesel combustion system, and they're doing what are called exhaust gas recirculation, or EGR sweeps, and then measuring the soot and NOx that come out the tailpipe. And when we compare those against a certification diesel at 30 percent blends for a number of candidates that we were looking at in the early to mid-part of this work, we see that all of these sustainable candidates reduced the soot production at a given EGR level, and because of that, they allow us to get to a lower NOx level by increasing EGR.

And I would particularly point out at the bottom in purple, that's a mixed oxymethylene ether, and I didn't really point to that one on the last slide, but that's a molecule or [inaudible due to interference] of molecules that have minimal carbon-carbon bonds, they only have carbon-carbon bonds if you [inaudible due to interference], which our team's been working on for some other benefits. But that allows you then to really minimize the amount of soot production, because you don't have any carbon-carbon bonds to start with, and soot is essentially large poly-aromatic hydrocarbons. So under these conditions, you're able to really increase the EGR and get both NOx and soot down by a factor of two to five. Alright, so next slide, please.

Okay, there we go. All the way through, one more I think it is. Yeah, there we go. But we're not just looking at fuel changes. So Chuck Mueller and the team at Sandia National Laboratories have been working on ducted fuel injection, or DFI. So this is essentially based on the principle of Bunsen burner; anybody who's had high school chemistry class has probably used one, and it's a way to get a little bit of pre-mixing between your air and your fuel charge before it ignites. So the great thing about this ducted fuel injection is that the team has been able to see, compared to the brown bars on the left, which are for a conventional diesel fuel and a conventional diesel engine, that using this ducted fuel injection can lead to a decrease of about 10 times in soot, as shown by the orange and the red in the middle. And then, if we add an oxygenated fuel, as in the blue bars on the right, we can really dramatically decrease the soot production, and through EGR, can also decrease NOx. So that's the fuel/engine co-optimization that we're seeking. So let's go to the next slide, please.

Let me try to speed it up a little, we're at 38 minutes. So one of the things that this allows us to do then, if we decrease NOx and particulate matter production, is we can decrease the cost. So we could  maintain or improve NOx and particulate matter control and do so at a lower total cost of ownership by reducing the cost in the emission system. Let's go to the next slide, please.

And we've also looked at advanced combustion approaches. As Robert said, originally it would have been firmly in Thrust II, and that ended up in our medium- and heavy-duty target. So this is work by John Dec and Darío Pintor López, also at Sandia National Laboratories, and they essentially used a combination of the information that we had obtained through our significant fuel-property testing and the computational capabilities to design a fuel. They formulated a better fuel, compared to a baseline research fuel that they used, that allowed them to increase RON, increase S, and increase something called  ø-sensitivity, which is a measure of how the auto-ignition reactivity changes with air/fuel equivalence ratio, that can be correlated then to efficiency and operability. They were able to increase all of those in their new fuel and demonstrate higher performance as well, so they could get higher [inaudible due to interference]. All right, so let's go to the next slide.

And, of course, along the way, as I said, we did a lot of this analysis to try to identify cost drivers for different conversion pathways, with different feedstocks. You can find the details for this analysis in a series of papers, as well as in the two reports that are out on the blendstocks. Next slide, please.

And one of the big drivers [inaudible due to interference] from the beginning was how do we reduce the carbon footprint of our transportation system. So part of what we did is we compared a huge number of potential ways to try to understand which pathways can meet a 60 percent greenhouse gas [inaudible due to interference], advanced biofuel under some conditions and extremely important. Now, we're thinking about what we can do to go further. So you can see that we've essentially been able to compare, which is useful maybe not as an approved pathway, like as in the LCFS system in California – is a good way to compare apples to apples for our life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions. So I think this particular set here is for the MCCI blendstocks, but we've done it for a large number of them. Let's go to the next slide, please.

And as I talked about for light-duty for gasoline, there's also some value in these bio‑blendstocks in the diesel range; we've got papers in publication submitted on this topic. The key drivers here are sulfur, low-sulfur content typically in the bio-blendstocks, depending on your hydrotreating process, and cetane. Now, higher cetane is required in California and elsewhere in the world, and there are some potential benefits there as well for both refiners and performance. So let's go to the next slide, please.

Okay, so shifting gears. So we learned a lot, I think along the way we also figured out things that still need to be done. And I do want to [inaudible due to interference] though, this [inaudible due to interference], there is still research that will go on in understanding how to scale up these biofuels and what needs to be done to make them fit for purpose, or able to be used in the marketplace for a given purpose. But at the same time, a lot of this work will transition, it should transition, into the private sector and elsewhere, and of course, universities will continue to do research on these topics where it makes sense to do so.

So three big takeaways here. The first one is that biofuels and internal-combustion engines are going to be part of the transition strategy, and we'll talk about that in a second. The second one is that a lot of work still needs to be done to scale up these biofuels so that they can be used for the purposes intended. And the third one is that, even if we were to generate 100 percent low-carbon fuels, there will probably be work needed in order to make engines that are on the road or engines that will be introduced in the next 10 years or maybe a little bit longer – to allow them to be used. Okay, so let's go to the next slide.

Okay, back one. So the world is changing; I think we all know that it's changing at a pace that is a little bit uncertain right now. On the left, you can see EIA, Energy Information Administration, projections that are almost certainly much more conservative than people think are really going to happen with the change from fueled to electric vehicles. On the right, you can see a more aggressive set of projections from Bloomberg New Energy Finance; the solid bars are their economic transition scenario, the greyed-out part of those solids bars that are colored are the net-zero scenario that they've generated – their actual data for 2020 and projections for every 10 years after that. And you can see that there has to be huge changes if we're going to get to a net-zero transportation economy, so we have to change faster. So let's go to the next slide.

And we can't just change on-road transportation. So we used these fuels, particularly, we used gasoline in lawnmowers and in off-road vehicles of various sorts. We used diesel fuel in a variety of different ways. We used different fuels, bunker and others for marine, and obviously, we used jet fuel for airplanes. We have to grow our sustainable fuel [inaudible due to interference], we need to address all of these applications, and we also have to recognize that they're going to change at different rates and scales. There's a really big push, and rightly so, to find sustainable fuels for aviation – sustainable aviation fuel is often called SAF, and that is a big focus within the department and elsewhere. I think there have been a lot of companies that are making these fuels, and those that have offtake agreements, to happen, again, at a fast rate but we still need to pull along these other roads as well. Let's go to the next slide, please.

And in order to do that, we also need to address the legacy ICEs that are going to be on the road. This isn't just a national problem – carbon dioxide goes everywhere in the world, not just in our nation, which means that we have to think about what's going to happen to vehicles in other nations. Many nations will work to electrify their systems in order to have electric vehicles to increase both their local independence, but [inaudible due to interference] energy sources, but also to increase air quality for environmental justice ends, so we have to think about – how we are going to enable internal combustion engines that are going to be around for a long time in rural areas, in areas that are not going to electrify at the same rate. So, we can do that in part by hybridizing where possible and providing sustainable liquid fuels that can reduce the emissions of these vehicles today. So this is all going to be part of a big suite of vehicles or propulsion technologies. Let's go to the next slide, please.

And I think this was summarized very nicely by Don Stanton from Cummins at our all‑hands meeting a few weeks ago. I borrowed this slide with permission from Don, or this figure with permission from Don. For the application, the propulsion choice will be matched to the needs of that particular system. This would include a variety of internal-combustion engines that will have diesel or natural gas or other fuels. It'll include various kinds of hybrids and potentially fuel cells, and then we're going to see a large electrification effort. And one of the takeaways from some of the modeling that we've done, lots of work on this elsewhere as well, and that's that electrification really improves your efficiency because it allows you to tune the drive cycle. And I didn't talk about some of the multimode work and modeling that shows that you can get an even bigger benefit for a hybrid engine. So let's go the next slide, please.

Well then, one obvious question – Will there be enough biomass? If we're talking about replacing a huge amount of fuel, can we really generate enough biomass to supply all of these hybrid or hard-to-electrify applications? The short answer is, we think, yes. The U.S. has done a number of work to try and identify biomass availability, I think exemplified in the Billion-Ton Study out of Idaho National Laboratory funded by the Bioenergy Technologies Office, large group of collaborators across the laboratories – also a very useful collaboration that exemplifies how the labs can work. But that report suggests that we could get 60 billion a year of fuel, that there's probably on the order of a billion tons. The cost goes up as you get up above 300 million, 600 million, a billion tons, but we could get maybe up to a 60 billion gallons a year.

Electrification will liberate capacity for ethanol, which could be converted [inaudible due to interference]. And we hear from folks outside the U.S. that, yes, with the right [inaudible due to interference] they think that there's enough biomass to generate the fuels and products that are needed. Of course, for all of these there's a key question, and that's where are we going to get the energy, and where are we going to get the hydrogen? Hydrogen is proxy for energy as well because that's probably going to come primarily from sustainable or renewable energy to electrolysis of water, which means now we have water consumption and we have energy consumption.

So we have to work through all the system-level questions, and that's going to require both technology development to improve the efficiency of every step along that way to ring out as much hydrogen as possible from the sustainable energy, and to ring out as much fuel as possible from those electrons and those fuels. So let's go to the next slide, please.

And as I said earlier, we're going to need to overcome barriers to use of these net-zero carbon fuels in legacy vehicles and in hard-to-electrify applications. So if we're talking about 90 percent or 100 percent low greenhouse gas fuels, we need to be able to do that at a cost that we can afford; we need to be able to do that in a way that the OEMs can warranty their vehicles, [inaudible due to interference] will not create knock-on effects or issues like we've seen in the past with some introductions; and we need to have standards that everybody can agree to and manufacture to, that will assure all of the folks in that value chain, in that ecosystem, that the fuels are going to be acceptable for those applications.

I'm showing on the right just an example of some of the compatibility work that [inaudible due to interference] by Mike Cass at Oak Ridge National Laboratory within Co-Optima, but this is just one example; we have a whole bunch of other examples where we've really looked at what it will take to get some of these fuels in the marketplace. Let's see, and then of course they're going to need engine modifications. So next slide, please.

So with that, I'd like to really [inaudible due to interference] heartfelt thanks to the 200-plus people who have made it my privilege to work with them over the last six years, and to help lead this program over the last year, and to the program managers past and present who have contributed to our program through their guidance, their wisdom, and of course their unflinching support throughout the course of this program. I realized we left Jonathan off there, Jonathan Male, former director of Bioenergy Technology [inaudible due to interference] Office was also a strong supporter.

Let's see, with that, I think one more slide. So I just realized that we don't have the publications link. If you go to one of the other webinars, or if you go to energy.gov, there's a publications database – online, searchable publications database – where you can find some of the key publications [inaudible due to interference] work. And you can find the recordings for any of these capstone webinars at that link below.

Okay, Robert. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have, and we thank you once again for your time and attention today. Okay, let's see if I can see – Are there any in the chat?

Robert Wagner: No, I see Alicia's on though, she reminded us what NFVSO stood for. I think you're right, Alicia. Let's see – I'm not seeing any questions.

Daniel Gaspar: Okay, I don't see any hands up either. Unfortunately, I can't always see the hands up. Well, if there are no questions, feel free to reach out to Robert or to me, or to any member of the Co-Optima team, and we'd be happy to talk with you at any point about this work or any of the other things we've done that we haven't shared.

Robert Wagner: And to Dan's point, check out the publication link, where there's the Year in Reviews and things like that, so if you search for Co-Optima publications it pops right up.

Daniel Gaspar: Okay. Thank you, Robert. Thanks to all of you for your time and attention today and I wish you a good day.

Robert Wagner: All right. Thank you.

 

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