The Energy Department and an engineering firm plan to announce on Tuesday that they have produced electricity from gasoline through a new method that yields twice as much useful energy per gallon as a car engine does, and with pollution 90 percent lower.
The development raises the prospect of an electric car, still quiet, swift and clean, but without the problem of heavy batteries that must be recharged often. Instead, such a car would be refilled with energy in minutes from the pump at the corner gasoline station and get twice the gas mileage of a comparable car with an internal combustion engine.
“We have a terrific breakthrough here,” said Federico Pena, the secretary of energy, in an interview. He said, however, that the technology was not about to go into immediate use. Such cars could be on the road by 2010, Pena said.
Other experts not directly involved with the new system praised it as an important technical achievement, although several pointed out that important steps remained before the method could be commercialized.
The method uses a fuel cell, a device first used by NASA for the Apollo moon program, that makes electric current by combining hydrogen and oxygen into water. Oxygen can be pulled out of air, but hydrogen has always been a problem, because it is expensive to produce and store.
The new method, developed by Arthur D. Little Inc., with $15 million from the Energy Department and technical aid from a nuclear bomb laboratory, is the first practical way to extract hydrogen efficiently and cleanly from gasoline, which is made of hydrocarbon molecules.
Pena said that because gasoline is available worldwide, automakers could produce a new generation of ultra-clean vehicles that would achieve twice the fuel economy, without having to develop a new network of refineries, pipelines, trucks and service stations for a new fuel. That barrier has largely defeated efforts to wean America’s 180 million cars from gasoline to methanol, ethanol or compressed natural gas.
Chrysler Corp. has announced that it wants to build a fuel-cell car that runs on gasoline.
“A lot of people thought this was a crazy idea,” said Christopher Borroni-Bird, a fuel-cell expert at Chrysler. “This shows it is technologically feasible.” Exxon Corp. and ARCO also are involved in fuel-cell research.
Making hydrogen from another chemical is called reforming.
Eugene Smotkin, a professor of chemical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and an expert on fuel cells, said “reforming gasoline is quite a feat.”
“We already have gasoline everywhere,” he said. “If you can actually reform gasoline, to give you hydrogen, that would be ideal.”
