Engineering & The Economy
Can Cars Run on Peas?
How do you keep gas prices down in the face of a shaky energy policy? Engineers and legumes, of course. The Bush administration issued new rules on Wednesday improving gas mileage requirements for pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and vans, for the first time covering the largest SUVs on the road like the Hummer H2 and Chevrolet Suburban. If adhered to properly, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system is expected to save 10.7 billion gallons of fuel over the lifetime of the vehicles sold during the period, officials said.
However, this might not be enough to prevent gas shortages and price hikes in the immediate future. Oil refiners plan to stop using an additive, methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, which accounts for about 10 percent of the volume of every gallon of gasoline with which it is blended (1.4 percent of the nationwide supply) next month because Congress refused to grant them protection from lawsuits. MTBE will be replaced with ethanol, but there are doubts within the Energy Department and the oil industry about whether there will be enough of the corn-derived fuel to meet the anticipated surge in demand, and whether the country’s distribution system is ready to handle it.
Engineers at the Agricultural Research Service are hard at work developing alternative ways to derive Ethanol from new organic sources. One promising prospect is peas. Chemical Engineer Bruce Dien, teamed with other scientists at the ARS have been working on a process that separates the peas’ protein and starch and uses enzymes and yeasts to ferment the starch’s sugars into ethanol. Read more about what engineers at the ARS are doing to help prevent a national fuel shortage here and here.
