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Kjell Bergström: Green Innovation & BioPower
Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference-Europe 2008
With fossil fuel consumption expected to reach its peak in the near future, large-scale innovations are needed to provide renewable energy sources. Kjell Ac Bergström provided an insider’s view how the automotive industry prepares for change. As CEO of General Motors’ European Powertrain division, he is driving the development of future motors which will rely on renewable fuel. One vision of the future is to move from today’s gasoline-powered combustion engines to hybrid cars, then to battery-powered electrical engines, finally to hydrogen-powered fuel cells.
He contrasted that vision with the GM concept which is based on ethanol fuel. He presented ethanol as the “dream fuel” from an engineer’s point of view. Ethanol can be produced by converting agricultural waste like residues from paper production. No carbon dioxide is emitted after a full cycle of biomass production and usage of the resulting Ethanol, if one neglects the energy consumption of the conversion process from biomass to Ethanol. Ethanol’s energy storage density is much higher than those of future hydrogen, albeit somewhat lower than that of gasoline.
Today, combustion engines of the Otto or the Diesel type are modified to run on a mixture of 85% Ethanol and 15% gasoline. Modifications comprise mainly of new engine control algorithms, modified materials and a heater to start the engine at temperatures below –15 degree Celsius (5° Fahrenheit). In Sweden, 90% of all Saab cars sold today feature this technology by GM called “BioPower”. They can either run on gas or on the E85 mixture of Ethanol and Gas.
Kjell Bergström went on to the next steps in the innovation pipeline. There are various new combustion schemes in development which further improve the clean combustion process and use 100% Ethanol. As a result, for a given engine size a higher power than with gasoline-powered engines is possible. This can be leveraged to “rightsize” the engine, gaining an even larger consumption advantage.
The vision presented by Kjell certainly comforted many in the audience, as it offered a positive outlook to a future world where individual transport by car looks possible despite a shortage of crude oil and the need to cap greenhouse gas emissions.
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Chas Martin
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Response: Run Your Car on Water -
Response: making biodieselSoya production primarily is not being cultivated to provide food for the world? s hungry population. Most of it is harvested in order to feed cattle in countries such as the United States, Western Europe and in China. The cattle are then processed to become beef that usually do not land ...
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