CoOptima: Redesigning Engines, Fuels, Marketplace strategies all at once

If you ever ask yourself why the US has a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy, supervising the Vehicle Technologies Office and the Bioenergy Technologies Office, here’s your answer: the CoOptima initiative.

In Washington, this new initiative out of the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy — brings together BETO and VTO in a co-ordinated effort. Now, resist the temptation to refer to the VEhicles Technology Office as VETO.

The initiative aims to accelerate the introduction of affordable, scalable, and sustainable biofuels and high-efficiency, low-emission vehicle engines. The simultaneous fuels and vehicles research and development (R&D) is designed to deliver maximum energy savings, emissions reduction, and on-road vehicle performance.

Although improvements over the years based on either fuel or engine advancements have made vehicles cleaner and more fuel efficient, transportation still accounts for 70% of overall U.S. petroleum consumption and 27% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. This project’s ambitious, first-of-its-kind approach simultaneously tackles fuel and engine innovation to co-optimize performance of both elements and provide dramatic and rapid cuts in fuel use and emissions.

This research and development collaboration between DOE, nine national laboratories, and industry is a first-of-its-kind effort to combine biofuels and combustion R&D. Right now it has two, er, “thrusts”. Their word, not ours.

The first is the near term efficiency of spark ignition engines. That is maximizing the capability of what we have today. The second, Thrust 2, is aimed at new fuels, advanced engines including compression engines.

“The goal is a new fuel in the market in 10 years,” said DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Reuben Sarkar, driver of the initiative. “We are looking for solutions that address environment, provide economic impact and are compatible with existing   infrastructure. Among the tasks is a definitive assessment of fuel properties that will help define engine parameters that utilize those properties. And, a database of fuel blendstocks to create novel fuel formulations. We are using this to drive our advanced combustion and hybridization efforts.”

The Approach

The Co-Optima initiative takes a three-pronged, integrated approach to identifying and developing:

1. Engines designed to run more efficiently on affordable, scalable, and sustainable fuels
2. Fuels designed to work in high-efficiency, low-emissions engines
3. Marketplace strategies that can shape the success of new fuels and vehicle technologies with industry and consumers.

The initiative’s integrated approach combines the previously independent areas of biofuels and combustion R&D, bringing together two DOE Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy research offices, nine national laboratories, and numerous industry and academic partners to more rapidly identify commercially viable solutions. This multi-year project will provide industry with the scientific underpinnings required to move new biofuels and advanced engine systems to market faster while identifying and addressing barriers to their commercialization.

This coordinated R&D effort complements established initiatives and partnerships. In addition to exploring synergies among the fuels, engines, and powertrains found in today’s traditional light-duty ICE vehicles, the initiative is also examining opportunities related to hybrid and plug-in hybrid technologies, as well as advanced compression ignition solutions that will benefit medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

The R&D approach integrates experimental testing with computational modeling and multi-scale simulation studies to enable prediction of performance and guide the optimization process. In addition to analyzing technologies from environmental and economic perspectives across the supply chain, researchers are working to identify potential market barriers and devise mitigation strategies.

The 7 Goals

7 Goals in all — and an ambitious set. DOE says that the project will provide U.S. industry with the R&D needed to:

• Reduce petroleum consumption “by billions of barrels a year”:

• Improve passenger vehicle fuel economy by 50%: 15%-20% beyond the projected results of existing R&D efforts

• Deliver tens of billions of dollars in cost savings annually via improved fuel economy

• Dramatically decrease criteria pollutants and GHG emissions from the transportation sector

• Accelerate the rate of advanced biofuels deployment

• Enhance energy security through more effective use of diverse domestic energy sources

• Spur U.S. economic and technological vitality.

What DOE Heard on Listening Day

Last summer, the DOE held a Listening Day workshop at NREL. Industry and other stakeholders recommended that DOE work harder of locking down the scope, and Expanding External Communications and Reach, Defining the Value Proposition, and Establishing and Maintaining Coordination and Collaboration. The day was heavy with DOE and National Lab people – though Ford, Chrysler, GM, Volvo, Cummins and Caterpillar were represented along with 10 or so from the fuels and refining sectors. More on the Stakeholder Listening Day here.

Barriers to Deployment

The Stakeholders identified: Policy, public perception, regulatory issues, infrastructure compatibility and feedstock. You might call this the Rounding-Up of the Usual Suspects.

The Bottom Line

There’s been quite a bit of chatter over the past five years about using the unique properties of new fuels to drive new engine designs to meet the extravagant US CAFE standards — octane is just one property that comes up quite a bit as a property that can support advanced compression engines with exotic fuel efficiencies. In terms of actual initiatives aimed at turning those ideas into practical engineering, this here’s the equivalent of the World Series of Poker’s Final Table — where all the big dogs play for the big stakes.