Technologue: First K.I.S.S

What if we could have our hydrogen economy and keep our filling stations and fuel tanks, too? We'd save about a trillion bucks in infrastructure costs. How can this be done? By taking a couple of hydrogen molecules and sneaking a carbon-monoxide in between them to produce CH3-OH, aka methanol. Liquid at room temperature, it pours, stores, and travels almost as easily as gasoline. Sure, it's corrosive, slightly toxic, and has half the energy density of gasoline, but compared with the challenges of handling the lightest element in the universe, those challenges seem zeptoscopic. And like hydrogen, you can choose to burn methanol or run it through a proton-exchange-membrane fuel cell to produce electricity, water, and CO2.

As the simplest alcohol (with only one carbon atom), methanol can be produced from biomass or other Green feedstocks without fancy enzymes and energy-intense distillation. As we explored last month, it can even be made from atmospheric CO2 (and a bunch of energy). Methanol's detractors often point to safety concerns like the fact that it burns without a visible flame, but methanol is actually harder to ignite than gasoline and its fire radiates less heat, leading the EPA to estimate that vehicle-related deaths, injuries, and property damage would drop by 90 percent if methanol replaced gasoline. And further improvements in vehicle efficiency plus a larger tank can compensate for the lower energy density.

Digging deeper into this methanol-economy concept reveals tantalizing car-guy benefits, too. Its high-octane rating allows for modest power improvement when used in flex-fuel applications (simple engine and fuel-delivery system mods are required for concentrations between 10 and 85 percent in gasoline). Greater efficiency and/or performance increases are possible in engines optimized to run on neat methanol (M100).

The EPA took a 1.9-liter VW diesel engine with 19.5:1 compression, swapped the direct injectors for spark plugs, fitted cheap port injectors, and ran it on methanol largely unthrottled but at the stoichiometric air-fuel ratio using exhaust-gas recirculation and turbo boost to regulate the mixture and load. The result: higher thermal efficiency than the original diesel over a broader operating range (peaking at nearly 43 percent to diesel's 41) in a cheaper engine with cleaner emissions requiring no exotic aftertreatment. Thank methanol's high knock resistance, denser charge (as it evaporates, it cools the air more than gasoline can), faster flame front, and slower heat release (which lowers NOX). M100 isn't ready for prime-time, though. It's difficult to combust at or below freezing temperatures, and the fuel is corrosive to valve seats, spark plugs, and other hardware.

Methanol has another efficiency-boosting trick up its sleeve. Using a fairly simple catalyst mounted to mooch heat off the exhaust system, the fuel dissociates easily into syngas (carbon-monoxide and hydrogen). The heat absorbed in this reaction raises the energy content of this gaseous fuel by 20 percent, which can be spent as power or additional range as it gets burned along with liquid methanol. If some could be stored, it might even ease low-temperature starting.

Best of all, the transition to methanol requires no radical rethinking of our vehicles and how we refuel them. Lotus Engineering's Jamie Turner proposes a timeline that starts with mandatory flex-fuel capability on all spark-ignition vehicles by 2012. This would encourage a gentle ramp-up of demand leading to widespread availability of non-food-based alcohols by 2020. Then with careful legislative inducements aimed at the energy sector, a further transition would be made to CO2-neutral methanol production, so that by 2030 the transportation sector could exit the climate-change debate altogether. That's essentially what hydrogen promised to do, but by keeping it simple we'll have big change coming back from hydrogen's trillion-dollar bill.