 Good afternoon, everyone. I think we're going to get started here. I'm thank you for joining us today, and thanks to those of you who are joining us online. I'm Jessie Stollark. I'm a policy associate at the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI is a nonpartisan independent nonprofit that was founded by a bipartisan congressional caucus. Today, EESI advances innovative policy solutions that set us on a cleaner, more secure, and sustainable energy path. Today, we're going to hear from several experts about why a high octane, low carbon fuel makes good sense for addressing transportation emissions. While there has been considerable discussion around the role that electric vehicles will play in decarbonizing the light duty fleet, and we expect these discussions to continue, liquid fuels will continue to make a substantial contribution to the transportation sector for several decades. Given this reality, available steps should be taken in the near term to increase the efficiency of internal combustion engines. One such step available is fuel engine co-optimization, which makes use of a high octane, low carbon fuel. While our discussion today will focus on the utility of these fuels, a high octane, low carbon fuel in the transportation sector, there are numerous pieces to introducing such a fuel in the marketplace. And I just wanted to make sure you were aware of this little worksheet that's out on the table that kind of lays out some of the other steps that are being taken to introduce this fuel into the marketplace. And it's also going to be posted on our website after the briefing. So let's get started. We have a lot of great speakers here, and we're delighted to be hosting the real experts on this timely topic. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce our first speaker. Dr. Robert McCormick is the principal engineer in the fuels and combustion science group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This group's research is focused on biofuels properties and fuel engine interactions, including biofuel quality, quantity and quality specifications, compatibility with modern engines, combustion, pollutant emission effects, and leveraging fuel properties for design of more efficient engines. Dr. McCormick? Well, thank you, Jesse. And it's a pleasure to be here today. What we have for you to start with is a message. By the way, if you tell them what you're going to tell them, it's pretty clear that liquid fuels are going to be around for a long time. There's certainly going to be a trend towards electrification in the transportation sector. But liquid fuels look very likely to be the primary energy source for probably decades to come. So if we're going to use liquid fuels, using them in the most highly efficient manner via high efficiency engines is going to have benefits for consumers. It's going to support economic development and, of course, protect the environment. So within the Department of Energy, there's a program called or an initiative called Fuel Engine Co-Optimization that I'll talk a little bit about today. That's identified renewable high-octane fuels that allow, if they were to be available, the production of much more efficient engines. We've also at ASTM created an ASTM standard for high research octane number test fuel to be used in high efficiency engines. And then finally, the final point that is our message today is that these engines are really based on known technology. It's not like we need to do a decade's worth of research to define what these engines are like. But they're not on the market today because the low-cost fuel that will enable them to be used is not available. So the Department of Energy's Fuel Engine Co-Optimization initiative has as its sort of instant elevator speech goal, better fuels and better vehicles sooner. This is a program sponsored by the Bioenergy Technologies Office and the Vehicle Technologies Office within Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at DOE. And perhaps a little more detailed statement of the goals and questions being asked is the list of bullets on the right. And I'll just point to the last one. Are there optimal fuel and engine combinations with the highest combined efficiency and greenhouse gas emission reduction? So perhaps a little more quantitatively, the goals of the program are to achieve a 15% fuel economy improvement for spark ignition engines, gasoline engines that are used in cars while at the same time diversifying the fuel resource base, providing additional options for those producing fuels to be able to make what I'm going to describe for you as a high octane number fuel and increasing the supply of domestically sourced fuels by very significant 25 billion gallons a year. So the Fuel Engine Co-Optimization Initiative is being done by nine different national laboratories, not just the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 15 different universities across the country. And we have a stakeholder group of over 70 different companies. And from that stakeholder group, we've developed an external advisory board. And so hopefully, while I've been telling you about all that, you've read the list of folks we have on our external advisory board and noted that they come from a very broad cross-section of the stakeholder industries. So the real sort of root of what we're working on is that current fuels constrain the efficiency of the engines we have today. So this chart shows on the vertical axis the engine thermal efficiency. And on the horizontal axis, the break mean effective pressure, which is just a wordy engineering term for engine torque or with how much force the engine turns the shaft. And so the lower curve is for 90, about 91, which is a regular gasoline today, basically. And if we increase the octane number by about 10, you can see that even at relatively low loads, we get some improvement in efficiency. And then as we go to higher and higher loads, this improvement in efficiency becomes quite significant. So these data come from my colleague Scott Sluder at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They're in a production engine using an engine that's optimized for this high octane number fuel. The efficiency improvements would be even greater and would likely go over 40% where this gasoline engine starts to approach, not quite equaling, but approach the efficiency of a diesel engine. So what is it about the fuel that limits efficiency? So the cartoon I show here on this slide is just a picture of an engine cylinder and piston and spark plug or a drawing. In a spark ignition engine, the fuel and air are mixed homogeneously. You ignite the fuel with the spark and then the flame from the spark burns across the volume of the cylinder. As that's happening, the temperature and pressure are getting hotter or higher in the engine. And if the fuel doesn't have adequate knock resistance, the fuel ahead of the flame front, this unburned fuel-air mixture, will auto-ignite or explode, essentially. And back in the old days, maybe the 50s and 60s and earlier, it made a knocking sound. And if it's bad enough, it can actually mechanically damage the engine and require really major repairs. So of course, no car maker wants their car to ever operate in that regime. And the electronic controls on cars today prevent the car from really ever knocking. But in doing so, they operate the engine in regimes that are much less efficient than would be the case if they had a more highly knock-resistant fuel. So knock resistance depends on a number of fuel properties. I list them here on the right. I'm not gonna go over them all. Octane number, research octane number is probably the most important, but the other properties are also important. And so octane number, just to make sure everybody's familiar with octane number, I'm sure you've seen the little yellow stickers on the dispenser when you buy gasoline. These have what we call the pump octane number, also known as the anti-knock index, which is the average of two different octane numbers. And this made sense back in the 1930s. But today, really knock resistance from an octane number perspective is much better described by the research octane number or the RON. And for the high efficiency engines that we're talking about, we think a 98 to 100 RON based on our results is in the neighborhood of where we need to go. I'd also note that there's no nationwide minimum requirement for octane in the United States. It's not regulated by the federal government. It's not included in the ASTM standard for gasoline. In my opinion, this is a significant limitation on engine efficiency. So how can we make engines more efficient? I list here several different technologies for making engines more efficient. And the first three, increased compression ratio, downsizing and down speeding and turbocharging. These things ultimately all lead to increased temperature and pressure in the engine. So they can be pursued a lot more aggressively if you have a more highly knock resistant fuel. I guess if you have questions about these, I could answer them later, but I think I'll just move on rather than going into details about the mechanical engineering of efficient engines. So as I noted, we have at ASTM developed a standard for a 100 research octane number test fuel. The purpose of this is to align the different groups developing engine technologies, give them a fuel to use that is gonna be the same across groups. This was developed by a work group that included representatives from the automotive, petroleum, biofuels and other stakeholder industries. And this is planned, at least it's my plan, that this would ultimately serve as a basis for a commercial high octane fuel standard going forward. So I did wanna say just a little bit about biomass source fuel. There's a lot of societal and environmental and technical advantages to fuel from biomass. I'm not gonna go over everything on this slide or go over the slide at all, but you have it in case it's of interest to you. Within the Co-Optima program, we've defined what are the the desirable properties of fuels in order to enable the design of really highly efficient engines. And then based on that, we've screened over 400 different fuel candidates that could be produced from biomass or could be produced as petrochemicals. And based on that, we've come up with the molecular structures I show here. I snuck in some molecular structures in a presentation on the hill. How did that happen? But I think the real important thing to notice that ethanol is on this list. And the rest of these things are a little more futuristic. Isobutanol maybe is relatively near term, but the other things are a ways out in time before there are gonna be commercial fuels. Ethanol, as you all know, is available today. When we look at our list of knock resistance properties, ethanol scores highly in every category for knock resistance. It looks like a E25 blend would provide this 98 to 100 octane number that we think is necessary. So my final slide is just repeating the message and the in brief. You know, when I'm an engineer, I have a message with five points instead of one. I know it's typical. The message is that the technology to make much more efficient engines is really available today. But the fuels to allow it aren't on the market today, but could be. And with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague, Brian West from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who's going to build on some of the things I've said. Great, thank you for that great overview. So next we're gonna hear from Brian West. Brian is a group leader at the National Transportation Research Center, a Department of Energy user facility, which conducts about half of the transportation research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There, Brian leaves the fuels and engines research group as they evaluate advanced fuel engine and vehicle technologies for the Department of Energy. His current work includes the use of ethanol and high octane fuels for improved vehicle efficiency. Brian. Thanks, thank you, Jesse and Bob. Can you hear me? Okay. So Bob really teed it up for me nicely there. Really good introduction. Bob showed this plot. I'm gonna show it again. As he said, ethanol has a really good octane number. It's a really good octane booster. And we like to note that you get about two thirds of the benefit from the first third of blending because it is a non-linear blending relationship. And so there's a lot of attention that has been given to this region right here around, around a third in the 20 to 40% range. And in fact, EPA kind of opened the door for a mid-level high octane blend in the tier three rule a couple of years ago. They said we allow vehicle manufacturers to request approval for a fuel such as a high octane, 30% ethanol blend for vehicles designed for such a fuel. So I'm gonna share some results with you today on some research we've done in that area. And to those who would say, how do we get a fuel like this out in the marketplace? That's certainly a very challenging thing. It's not a trivial thing to do, but it's certainly easier than some of the other alternatives, like a nationwide hydrogen infrastructure, for example. And in fact, our USDA biofuel infrastructure partnership has been helping grow the number of fueling stations that are able to dispense mid-level blends. There's about 1,000 stations today selling E-15 and many more pumps going in every day that are capable of higher blends. So DOE, as Bob indicated, has been doing some research in this area. And also we have a lot of great industrial partners who have been supporting us with technical support as well as funds in and just hardware. And Bob showed you this thermal efficiency plot earlier. I'm gonna show it again. There's the black curve that he showed again for the base engine with regular gasoline. The blue curve here is the same one he showed. That's E-30 fuel and that same engine, but then he mentioned making hardware changes. So that green curve at the top is what happens when you raise the compression ratio along with that high octane fuel. So with high octane fuel and engine design changes, we can improve both the efficiency and the torque and power which gives the manufacturer more options. So having a fuel like this in the marketplace could move us towards many goals. As Bob indicated, we can improve efficiency and power in this 20 to 40% blend range. The efficiency gain from the hardware changes and the high octane number can offset the loss of BTUs per gallon if you will so that you get what we call volumetric fuel economy parity. And that's important. It gives the manufacturers a fuel economy benefit at lower screen house gas emissions. It helps the U.S. comply with the renewable fuel standard. So there, we like these black on yellow squares. So we have today's octane numbers here. Maybe the future is a high octane blend like a Ron of 100. So let me just share a few example results with you from some of the work we've been doing. If you were here two years ago, we did a briefing for EESI and I talked about this Cadillac. We bought a Cadillac ATS. It's a turbocharged two liter vehicle. And this is the kind of engine like we've been talking about that can take advantage of high octane fuel. With our industry partners, we're able to acquire some prototype pistons. So we raised the compression ratio from nine and a half to 10 and a half. That's a pretty modest increase. But with that small increase and some other hardware changes to the vehicle, we've been able to demonstrate efficiency gains in the five to 10% range, even 12% in one test. Some industry partners asked us to look at this Mini Cooper. This is a vehicle that if you look at the owner's manual, you see a screenshot right there. It says that fuels are the maximum ethanol content of 25% may be used for refueling. So there was a lot of excitement around BMW stating that the car could use E25. So this again is a car with a two liter turbo GDI engine. We made absolutely no hardware changes to the car. All we did was change the fuel and we're able to show some power and efficiency gains. So here's an experiment where Bob mentioned downsizing. So what we did was we told this poor little car that weighs about 2,500 pounds. We told the chassis dynamometer where we were testing it. There was a 4,500 pound Dodge Charger. Did I say that wrong? It's a Mini Cooper. We told the dyno it was a Dodge Charger. So this would be like me putting my 100 pound kit on my back and trying to run a 100 yard dash. You can imagine that makes it, I have to work a lot harder. So the little car is working really hard to push what it essentially thinks is a 4,500 pound car through this aggressive driving test. And you see we get a 3.5% efficiency gain in that experiment. Extreme downsizing can hurt your performance. So here's the two bars show you the acceleration performance of the Mini Cooper with E10 and with E25. E25 makes the car just a little bit faster about four tenths of a second. Again, if we tell the dynamometer that it's a 4,500 pound car it slows it down a lot, right? Takes it from nine seconds to 13 seconds. But again, the E25 fuel improves the acceleration performance by four tenths of a second. And then just for fun, we hooked up an aftermarket chip you may have heard of some of the kids today chip in their cars. This is intended for racing but for scientific purposes we hooked one of these up and this little two liter engine and this 4,500 pound car shaved 2.4 seconds off the acceleration time. So this shows what's available to the manufacturers if this fuel is widely available in the marketplace. Finally, we have an experiment currently going right now with a Ford F-150. This is an industry funded program. The Ford F-150 has a three and a half liter V6 EcoBoost engine. We've completed our baseline testing and I'll share just a little bit of results with you today using the same E10 and E25 that we ran in the Mini Cooper that I showed a moment ago. We've completed a piston swap. So you see a picture of the factory piston there on the left. This engine has 10 to one compression ratio from the factory and Mala power train designed and manufactured some prototype 12.2 to one pistons for us. So those have been installed and the engine runs and the vehicle's in our dynamometer lab now. And this is significant. This is a more significant compression ratio increase than we've evaluated so far. So I shared with you the results from the Cadillac where we only went up one point. Now we're going up by 2.2 compression ratios which gives us hopefully better fuel economy gain. So those experiments are underway now. We'll be measuring fuel economy, of course, gaseous and particle emissions and acceleration. So let me just share some results with you. Here's a side view of those beautiful pistons. So here's acceleration performance for the truck and its factory setup with E10 and E25, not unlike the Mini Cooper. We're looking at up to a half a second acceleration performance improvement with the E25 fuel. Again, this is with the factory setup. We didn't change anything but the fuel. We're measuring particulate matter emissions as we do these experiments. And we see a really significant reduction. This is statistically significant reduction in particulate matter with the E25 fuel. So that's also very exciting. So really looking forward to getting some more results on this truck with the new pistons to share with you. So in summary, I think I've shown you that with high-octane fuel and engine hardware changes, you can produce more power. You can get higher efficiency. If you make more power, you can either have a faster car or you can put that engine in a larger vehicle or the manufacturer can design a smaller engine to go in that same car so the consumer doesn't give up any performance. So I'm gonna stop there and look forward to the Q&A session. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. So next we're gonna hear from Dean Drake. Dean is a retired engineer from General Motors where he had 34 years of service, most of which was in the powertrain engineering and corporate public policy arena. At GM, Dean was responsible for numerous environmental initiatives and he founded the DeFour Group in 2007, a consulting firm specializing and analyzing economic impacts of environmental regulations for automotive and energy industry clients. His group is currently evaluating the economics of high-octane low-carbon fuels and that's what he's gonna talk to us about today. Okay. Always something. Hey, I'm doing it right. Nope, oh, I see. All right, now we're off to a good start. As by way of background, how I got and the DeFour Group got into the business of looking at ethanol since most of my clients now are corn growers and as a matter of fact, I can't even grow house plants. But we originally got a contract from Minnesota to just in 2013 to start looking overall at the economics of ethanol blend fuels and particularly what would happen if you optimized the octane of a fuel like Brian and Bob are doing today. And so at about that time, DeFour Group had expanded from one people to four people because GM was shaking off a lot of employees and two of them were PhD economists who were friends of mine. So they joined me in this effort and we started looking at ethanol blend fuels. Now at this time we were pretty much agnostic as to whether ethanol was a good idea. But as we got into this, it became more and more apparent that there was a lot more going on with ethanol when you blend it with gasoline than it was popularly understood. So we started digging into this and found that E10 was a very good fuel but it wasn't by any means optimum. And the realization that although electric vehicles and cleaning up the power grid were initiative for the future, even after the best work is done on electric vehicles and the grid has been cleaned up, there are just some niches that are impossible, market are very difficult to run with batteries. Now the obvious one of course is aircraft but less obvious are things like work trucks, passenger vans, things like large SUVs and of course plug-in hybrid vehicles by definition have to have a liquid fuel. So if you're going to have a liquid fuel and it's gonna be around for a while it makes sense to have the optimum possible liquid fuel. Now with all apologies to Dunkin Donuts the US already runs on ethanol blend fuels as Bob mentioned. 10% of our gasoline is an ethanol blend or has ethanol in it. All of our gasoline has 10% ethanol in it, thank you. And this has happened over 10 years. As you can see by the graph on the right or the left we went from in 2005 less than 4 billion gallons of ethanol being produced to now up to 15 billion gallons of ethanol produced. Now this happened for a number of reasons. Obviously everybody thinks a renewable fuel standard and that was one impetus for it but even before that from every time there was an energy crisis what was called a 10% blend what used to be called a gas-a-haul would always appear on the market because ethanol was cheaper when ethanol got cheaper than gasoline marketers would start selling this gas-a-haul blend. In fact, the RFS did not demand a 10% ethanol blend. It just demanded that oil companies start blending increasing amount of ethanol into gasoline. It was the oil companies themselves that decided on 10% and that's because this fuel had been around for a while since the days of the Model T in fact cars had been designed to run on it. It was a very convenient thing to do to just add 10% ethanol to all the fuel. Now once that happened other things started to happen. The octane of the gasoline blend stock was lowered from 87 octane which is what you see at the pump down to 84 octane which is cheaper for the oil companies to make so they started not selling gasoline but gasoline blend stock. That saved them a lot of money. Then when the ethanol got shipped to a blender the blender would add the 10% ethanol that added the octane and you'd ship that final product out to retailers. Which all meant that in this period of 10 years our entire fueling infrastructure got changed from producing and selling pure gasoline to producing, distributing and selling ethanol blend fuels. And in fact, a number of studies including one that's been ongoing by the four group for four years now shows that 87 octane E10 is less expensive to the consumer even when you consider things like the difference in energy density than would be an 87 octane pure gasoline. But as I said, E10 was not some magic number that was chiseled on a stone and given to us by Congress. It was instead a historical artifact. Clearly from what you heard before 10% is not a magic number or even the ideal number. Now it's important to realize that you don't have an opportunity to change the octane of fuel very often. I was in my early 20s when we got 87 octane low lead gas. I hoped to live to see the day that we have a higher octane based fuel. So whatever blend we choose is going to be with us for a long, long time and this is why there's so much research and so much study going into this. Now if you fully, what E10 told us is that if you fully use ethanol's octane values which the oil companies did by lowering the octane of the blend stock, you can reduce consumer cost. In fact with ethanol, what we have is an era of low cost plentiful octane if only we can figure out how to use it. This has not happened since the invention of tetraethyl lead. So if you're in the auto business, this is a big deal. We already explained why high octane is a good idea but another thing we learned from the E10 experiment is that new fuel is best implemented. First of all, when there's a big diverse group of stakeholders. Now don't get me wrong, it doesn't mean every stakeholder has to be in the group but there has to be enough of them that you overcome the institutional barriers of implementation. And finally, it told us that the change works best if it's by and large transparent to the public. The only way you would possibly know at most gas stations that you're putting in an ethanol blend gasoline is somewhere on the pump there's a little label that says it may contain 10% ethanol. Other than that, nothing changed. The labels are the same, the pumps are the same, everything. So as you know right now from what you've heard, there's been a lot of research to determine what the optimum ethanol blend should be. And that work is beginning to wrap up or beginning to get to the point where we're moving from the laboratory and starting to figure out how to get it onto the road, how to get it in the hands of the public. And I have a personal thing involved in this. I'd like to see it happen before I die. Now, one of the things the D4 group has been working on recently is to study the impact of high-octane fuel on both new vehicle costs and on lifetime fuel expenditures for the public because one of the first questions that's gonna come out is people are going to ask, how much is this going to cost? And there is an assumption in most of America if this is something that is encouraged by Washington it's gonna cost us more money. And I think that's most people's impression of ethanol and gasoline today even though it's demonstratively a false contention. So we started initially in 2016 with the Air Improvement Resources Inc. and Tom Darlington to analyze what would happen if this new fuel and high-efficiency engines were available to EPA when they came up with their laundry list of technologies that they used to base the 2025 standards on. And the way EPA does this is does the calculations on how much it costs to meet fuel economy standards is they have a fuel economy or a computer model called Omega. Now, there's actually two parts of it. There's another part called Alpha that we don't use and Alpha feeds Omega the data. And I've come to the conclusion that Washington is the greatest source of creative acronyms the world has ever seen. But at any rate, we only have Omega but that is enough for us to do what we wanted to do. Omega basically works like Harry Potter's sorting hat. It takes all these technologies, their costs, their benefits and applies it to the 2025 fleet in vehicles to determine kind of what is the most cost-effective order. You do the most cost-effective first and then the less cost-effective. I got three minutes left. Okay, so I won't describe to you what Omega does but what the output says is that if you had this technology available, you would save on the average 2025 vehicles $436 and on a SUV, a Buick Enclave $873. And you can see the SAE paper number. We did a presentation at the World Congress. You can read all about it. But the problem is there's two potential high-octane fuels. There's premium grade E-10 that's out there right now. And in theory that could be further refined to have properties that are more like the optimum fuel that's being envisioned for an E-25 but premium's more expensive than regular. Then there's what we're talking about the E-25 which I like to call performance grade fuel that begins with E-10. You add more ethanol to boost the octane and therefore, since you start out with E-10 and ethanol is historically going to be less expensive than gasoline, you're going to end up with a fuel that costs the same or less than today's regular E-10. So somebody had to do this study is E-10 a viable, E-10 premium even a viable option. So two things you need to do to have this study done. You need to, if you're going to look at what it costs in a brand new 2025 vehicle to run for the rest of its useful life on one fuel or the other, you have to know the fuel prices or guess the fuel prices from 2025 to 2055. And on the one column there, I show you some of the things that went into that but we came up with a number. We started with a number for the 2016 model year and then use the energy information agencies annual increase in prices from up to 2050 to have a number that we could then ramp that cost of each one of those input stocks up up to 2025. Then similarly, the annual gallons consumed, you can read through the list, but it's basically what EPA does to calculate the lifetime fuel usage for a car when they set the standards. There were a lot of tangential questions before we could even begin the study that we had to ask ourselves and do some considerable research to figure out whether or not any of these things would significantly increase the, or change the results that we got. The short answer is the time I have left is we looked at them, they didn't seem to be any real problem. Now, this is what we came up with. If you have a typical 2025 model year vehicle as EPA envisioned it with a low compression engine and running on today's regular grade gasoline and then you've changed that to a high efficiency engine using high octane fuel. If you, you could say $590 if you ran that vehicle on E25 ethanol. And you can see the breakdown there, $436 for the vehicle itself and another 154 in savings for the fuel. If you use premium at today's market markup that the oil companies use to sell premium. And I call this without E25 because if the oil companies do not have any competition in a premium market, why would they change their budget model, their markup model? You would end up spending over $1,325 more for fuel than you would if you just had the low compression ratio E10 engine. And that answers the question that we often get asked. Well, premiums out there, why aren't manufacturers just flocking to use premium fuel and high compression ratio engines because the fuel costs too much? And true, if the price of premium would drop down with competition to where we think premium should be based on the same markups and everything they use for E10 regular, yes, you could save $32 over today's vehicles, over today's technology, but that's still $662 more you would be paying than if you used E25. And then the potential savings are even greater with trucks. It almost doubles with trucks like the Buick Enclave. And that's going to be the market that's going to use liquid fuels the longest. So my conclusions, because I'm sure I'm out of time by now, as I say, the nation has already using ethanol blend fuels in virtually every vehicle. And that's E10. But the ideal number is not 10%, it's something considerably higher. And going from 10% to 25% ethanol, creates a fuel that has greater octane than premium grade gasoline, but would cost less. This totally upsets everybody's thinking about premium grade gasoline and cost. It's going to be a completely different model in the future. And the bottom line is, when you add it all up, all this wonderful world of high efficiency engines enabled by high octane fuel will only work if the fuel is not today's premium gasoline. Now, some people spent a lot of money to have me reach that fairly obvious conclusion. But in this effort to try to demonstrate the potential of mid-level blend fuels, you really do have to come up with an answer to practically every question. Thank you. Thank you, Dean, for that history lesson. We're gonna close up with Andrew Varko. Andrew is a partner at Boyden Gray and Associates, which he joined in 2017. Prior to that, he was the Deputy General Counsel for Agriculture and Environment at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, and previously an attorney in the Office of General Counsel at the USDA. I'm gonna turn it over to Andrew. That's fine, can everyone hear me? So how many people here are lawyers? I'm outnumbered by normal people, so I'll have to be really careful. I'm gonna try to avoid obscurity in the tail. I'm gonna skip a lot of the slides or run quickly through them. The details are in the slides as well as in publicly available comments and documents of that sort that our law firm has filed and are available on our firm's website and otherwise. So the big picture is that we have a window of opportunity right now. There are some longstanding historical, legal and regulatory barriers to widespread market availability of mid-level ethanol blends and of vehicles optimized for such blends that could go away soon. And the occasion for this opportunity is EPAs and the Transportation Department's mid-term review of greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards doesn't necessarily mean that all these things are gonna be acted on at this time, but it is a kind of inflection point for thinking about pathways for progress on these important issues. The issues I'm gonna summarize are certainly complex, perhaps slightly uninteresting at times and real, but they also present achievable opportunities under the current legal framework. And the actions I'm talking about today are deregulatory in nature. They'd let the market decide the viability and desirability for consumers of mid-level blends. And I'd also just add briefly, I'm sure some of you are very, very familiar with the details of the Renewable Fuel Standard Program. These issues I'm talking about are distinct from the issues presented by that program. They're related in various ways, but action on one doesn't necessarily solve problems related to the other. All right, away we go. So five years ago in the previous administration, EPA and the Transportation Department through its agency, NITSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, issued a final rule setting increasingly ambitious greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards for motor vehicles from model years 2017 through 2025. And as part of that decision, briefly, EPA, NITSA, and California, which also has regulatory authority in this area, agreed to complete the MTE, as it's called, a joint midterm evaluation or more colloquially a reality check on the standards to determine whether they are appropriate or not. At the very talent of the prior administration, the prior administration did determine they were appropriate and is not uncommon. The new administration took a different look, decided to reopen the process, took comments, is now considering what to do and we should have a decision from EPA and possibly DOT as well. I think likely probably both will formally do something by April the 1st of this year and it will be a binary decision. Either they're appropriate, we just stay on course or not, but it's quite possible that the agencies will say other things as well when they decide. In particular, when EPA formally invited comments on the appropriateness of the standards, EPA invited comment on a high octane blends, as is noted in the slides. And so many stakeholders have commented on these issues in the formal comments that were filed through last month. It should also just note that the current EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has said publicly that octane needs to be considered with regard to the fuel economy standards. I think it fair to say that this is a pretty big opportunity. I don't know. Okay, I was wondering why those slides were blank. I see. All right, so we have various stakeholders commenting on these issues. EPA in itself flagged the importance of octane as helping with compliance and performance. And there we have comments from the auto alliance on octane issues, without advocating any particular pathway to high octane fuel, but noting them the many benefits and opportunities presented. So there are a number of regulatory issues that today would make it difficult, if not impossible to commercialize high octane, mid-level ethanol blend fuels. But EPA is considering these issues. And one has been in the press affair amount. There were legislative efforts to resolve this issue early this year on fuel volatility, read vapor pressure, or RVP is a measure of fuel volatility. And there's a special provision in the Clean Air Act, it's very obscure and technical, but in short, EPA regulates fuel volatility if you will read vapor pressure in the summer months during the high ozone season. And there is a special provision that allows loosening of this requirement for fuel blends containing gasoline and 10% denatured anhydrous ethanol. EPA historically has interpreted that to mean nine to 10% ethanol. And we think that this particular interpretation, which is about 25 years old, is intention with the text of the statute, if not in conflict with it, and that EPA has the regulatory authority to apply the waiver to higher ethanol blends. And I'll spare you some of the legal argumentation on this, which is difficult to summarize, but there's some good textual evidence for this position. And quite apart from the text, once you get higher than E-10, volatility goes down. So it does make a lot of sense to have a special waiver just for E-10. E-15, E-15 has been in the marketplace now for several years, pursuant to a waiver decision that EPA issued several years ago. It's penetrating the marketplace, becoming more and more available. But the old interpretation of the volatility waiver law means that many retailers find it very hard to switch fuels in the summer, and they just don't offer it. Now that's changing, I think to some extent, but relief on the volatility issue would help, certainly. And here's some quotes from administrator Pruitt on his looking into this issue quite actively. And that's the limits of his legal authority. So there may be more publicly announced on this soon. Second regulatory issue, certification fuel. A test fuel. Motor vehicles have to comply with EPA fuel economy, I'm sorry, Transportation Department fuel economy and EPA emissions requirements. And so there are all kinds of regulations on how you test those vehicles and on the specific fuels that have to be used to do the testing. You can't just use any old fuel. And also those fuels that are permitted for testing are also permitted to be used commercially. So if you have an approved test fuel, then you can also sell it. And so then that makes it all easier for a manufacturer to design an engine that's optimized to that particular fuel rather than one that's maybe optimized for another blend. It doesn't work as well with the blend you're interested in. So EPA has in the past approved its own certification fuels without anybody's asking them really to do so formally, but there's also a vehicle or a route to engine manufacturers and auto manufacturers to apply as well. Then these other issues, if anything, are even more technical and obscure than RVP and cert fuel issues, but they're also important. They lie in the background, some of them even have trade impacts that are not good for the United States necessarily. And I will just blaze through these and note them. And then if you have particular questions, we can talk about those in the Q and A. There's a fuel economy factor called the R factor that essentially hurts auto manufacturers that wanna use ethanol blends. And EPA has been working on this issue for years and it's acknowledged it's a problem and just hasn't fixed it yet. So that's an example. Then a life cycle analysis. That's a sort of fancy term for how do you figure out whether a fuel has good greenhouse gas emissions or gas profile? Well, you could look at just part of what that fuel does or you could look at the whole life cycle involving the creation of the fuel and the planting, if it's ethanol, the planting of the corn that led to the creation of the fuel. And so a lot of very intelligent people spend a lot of time analyzing the carbon life cycle impacts of ethanol and other fuels. We actually have three federal agencies working on these issues right now and I'm afraid that they don't all agree with one another and EPA analyzed the issue for renewable fuel standard program purposes several years ago and our view is that its analysis needs to be updated and doesn't give enough credit to corn ethanol given current corn production practices. Okay, so I'll just note air quality modeling is incredibly technical but if the model says that a fuel is bad when the fuel isn't bad then that's going to mislead stakeholders and regulators and we think there are some problems there. So with that, I will close. Thank you Andrew for that breeze through all these issues. So I'm going to invite all the speakers up at this time. We're going to open it up to questions from the audience. We have a portable microphone. So just ask that you wait till the mic reaches you so that everybody watching online as well can hear you and please identify yourself before you ask your question. Do we have any questions? Let everybody get seated first. Well I can start out with a question. I have a question for Brian actually which is can you discuss, so we're talking about high octane fuels and these co-designed engines but can you talk about what the utility of a high octane fuel would be in a hybrid engine? Yeah, that's a great question Jesse. Cause we did talk a little bit Bob particularly in his opening remarks talked about the electrification in the future and you did as well. Hybrid vehicles, they have engines. High octane fuel is going to make a hybrid engine better too. You raise the compression ratio of the engine in your hybrid vehicle and you could have a again downsized or boosted or what have you. So I think there's, it's a win-win. It would win for conventional vehicles but also a win for hybrids. Questions? We have two up front here's the microphone. Well, I kind of want to take a little issue with you and what you're defining as a hybrid electric vehicle because I think right now they're all Atkinson cycle engines and from my own experience that at least increased ethanol high octane fuel run in a 2007 Prius when the weather is cold you get incomplete combustion presumably because the engine never heats up. You can smell the ethanol coming out the back. Now I would kind of wonder whether anybody has really looked at that as an issue. I mean if you're using a modern engine that's turbocharged and everything that's addressing its torque issues from the engine itself, the real reason to have a hybrid electric vehicle is to address torque issues and get better fuel economy from the Atkinson cycle. So I kind of not sure that you're absolutely right there. That's a good point and all generalizations are bad. So I think certainly I could imagine a hybrid electric vehicle where that would be an advantage and I can certainly imagine a manufacturer could choose to not design for that. So, but fair question. You know the early, early volts were premium required cars are not premium required anymore because consumers probably complained despite not having to buy very much fuel. So fair point. Thank you. And if I could add about the cold operation cold start emissions issue that car has to meet the same emission requirements as every other car. So I'd let you know that's an you gave me an anecdotal example that maybe emissions are higher but I'm not gonna believe it till I see data. Question. I'm Bob Kosak from Atlantic Biomass conversions. I appreciate this panel. We did it a few years ago and it's always good to hear the latest on how ethanol works. And I guess the frustration for those of us who are out there trying to develop new crops for the production of ethanol and biofuels are despite all this good information why aren't we getting things through? And I guess I'm asking more to Andrew and possibly Dean, you know why is there so much opposition to moving from E10 to say E25? And when you're asking about getting things through are you talking about RFS pathways at all for, okay. Yeah. Just increasing blending. Yeah. Blend volumes. Yeah. Well, I can't speculate too much but I'll speculate slightly. I think bureaucratic inertia is very, very powerful. And when you have a sort of array of pre-existing historical regulatory barriers that are kind of interlocking that they can become a sort of excuse for inaction. I think that's perhaps one factor. I'm sure there are others as well. There are a lot of sort of interrelated concerns by different stakeholders about making a change too fast that doesn't account for all the risks perceived by particular stakeholders or groups of stakeholders. I think that would be relevant also. And I would also like to mention that E20, one of the problems I think E10 was successful because every car could use it. There was no issue about that that had been demonstrated in real world. No problems. In addition, because E10 had been historically in the market for a long time there were no regulatory barriers. Every state allowed E10 because it was one of the fuels that was widely available. When they went to E15 or released E15 that put the consumer in an interesting position. They were told, you decide whether or not your vehicle can use this fuel. Well from a consumer standpoint that's something they don't like to do. And then as Andy mentioned there are regulatory barriers. As we look forward to a high octane E25 we're talking about using it in vehicles that were specifically designed to use that fuel. So you're in a way back to where we were with E10. The population of vehicles for which E25 would be used would be designed from the ground up to use that fuel. So hopefully we won't have the same problems with E25 that we've had with some of these other blends. I would also just add that in 1979 that E10 was approved through a kind of streamlined approval process that isn't available now because the statutory and regulatory framework has changed but I think some of the obstacles that higher level blends of phase just weren't there after that fairly, I think fairly uncontroversial decision was made in the late 70s. Other questions? We have one in the back here. Good afternoon, this is Prentice Searles from the American Petroleum Institute. A couple of thoughts that I've wanted to share and I just wanted your thoughts and feedback on it. Brian, you mentioned that it wasn't, it was a trivial idea to be able to worry about the infrastructure and you mentioned there's about 1,000 vehicles that are 1,000 pumps that are built for E15 and there's 150,000 stations in the country and the majority of those are owned by individuals who own a single store. So when you look at the cost of improving infrastructure it's actually quite significant to make that in E25 into a reasonable product and get it out to everybody. How do you address that? Thanks Prentice, I said it's not trivial. I didn't say it was trivial, I said it was not trivial. So there's 1,000 stations selling E15 but right now as of what, 18 months ago, Wayne announced that all their sundown and the E10 dispensers, all dispensers going in now are E25 compatible. So they may be selling E10 or E0 but they're E25 compatible so that infrastructure is growing and again I think it's a significant thing to worry about if you're gonna figure out how to do it. Also you don't need to have 160,000 stations offering the fuel, I drive by 10 gas stations on my way to work, if one of them had the fuel I needed that would work. So 10 to 20% of the market is probably all we need to be able to roll something out. Also it could be rolled out in regions. It might grow first in the Midwest for example where there's a lot of product and then we see a lot more E85 in that part of the country now. So but that's a fair point, thank you for that. As a follow up, I don't know if Brian, if you wanna talk to us or somebody else does but what's the typical rollover for the pump infrastructure at the retail level? Yeah, I should know the answer to that but don't. Christy Moriarty's not here. And I'm not gonna guess. That's written down somewhere, apprentice knows. Yeah, so if you're looking at underground storage tanks, that's about 30 years. So the infrastructure that takes all of the piping and accoutrements hanging down into that, those are also not necessarily compatible with the 15 or anything above E10. So that is typically 30 years. And then your dispenser is in the ballpark of 15 years. So it'll take quite a while for it to roll over from an E10 dispenser to an E15 dispenser. And I bet you gotta get everything underground and compatible also. You wanna follow up? Yeah, I wanna take it. Throw in a little historical factoid as Jesse mentioned. I love history. I lived a lot of it and I remember when the Arab oil embargoes came along. Shortly thereafter, light duty diesel gas or fuel became widely available in an amazing short length of time around the nation and it's still available. So I think if there's a strong economic incentive that favors one fuel over the other, like I talked about in my presentation, I think that the brilliance of our capitalistic system is that the various players up through the, keep in mind infrastructure up through the terminal level, there's no issue about infrastructure. A terminal can blend E25 just as easily as E10. Once it leaves, the question is once it leaves the terminal and goes to the retail outlet, how many of those retail outlets are going to be able to adapt in what length of time? And I think that the retail outlets would have a very strong economic incentive to find out what kind of tanks they have in the ground. Those that have tanks that are E25 compatible would have a very strong market incentive, perhaps to maybe stop selling one form of fuel and instead using that for the E25. But it would happen just like it did with light duty diesel. It would be available. Thank you, Dean. And I think if you go back to our briefing two years ago on this subject, infrastructure was discussed if you're interested. Are there any other questions in the audience? Can I address? Since we don't have any questions at this moment, is there any followup that you're closing thoughts that you, the speakers wanted to provide? What is your key takeaway? We have a question up front here. Hi, I'm Dave Roscoe with SBA Office of Advocacy. I'm not an engineer, so I don't know how to translate the power curves, but I was wondering if you could translate the increase in efficiency into fuel economy terms, since we're talking about the federal government reviewing requirement to reach upwards of 50 MPG, which is a significant jump from the current standards and despite the auto alliance's enthusiasm for high octane, they don't have much enthusiasm for the higher MPG requirements. Sure. That's a great question. Andy's slides, he mentioned the R factor, which I'll save you from trying to explain what that is, but if you go back and look at the slides, the fuel economy plots that I showed were all E0 equivalent, so that's basically multiplying your actual miles per gallon by the ratio of the energy densities of your fuels, and that gets everything on a common basis as if everything was run on gasoline. That's what the R factor is supposed to do, but so my data is for an R of one, which is what I think the auto manufacturers would like to see, currently the R factor is 0.6, so to belabor a point, if E25 were a cert fuel and the R factor were not changed, the manufacturers would not get the full benefit of the efficiency gain that they're able to engineer into the vehicle. So if the R factor is fixed, and it's actually, they have to meet two rules. There's a CAFE rule, which is miles per gallon, and then there's the EPA rule, which is greenhouse gas emissions, which is not just CO2, so from a regulatory standpoint, it's very complicated, and I'll defer to my attorney at the end of the table for further comment. Did I answer your question, sir, a little bit? Not really, sure, okay, so one of my slides I talked about, volumetric fuel economy parity, so today if you take a car that's not a turbocharged car, and it's not optimized, and you put 25% ethanol in there, you're likely to see a 5% to 7% MPG difference between that and say an ethanol-free gasoline. If we let the ethanol boost the octane number and the manufacturer designs the engine to take advantage of that octane number, you're gonna get the same miles per gallon, despite having lower BTUs per gallon, you'll get the same miles per gallon that you would get in today's car. So there's an enormous benefit to the manufacturer there if this R-factor is in fact repaired or corrected. So think of it as a 5% or 6% or 7% fuel economy gain for the manufacturer, which doesn't sound like much, but they have to get 5% a year for the next five years, which is a very daunting thing for them to do. They'll look at many, many technologies, and this is pretty low-hanging fruit. From an auto perspective. Well, this brings up a very interesting point, which is the whole idea of miles per gallon as a metric. This metric only makes sense in a world where 100% of your fuel is petroleum. When you go to alternate fuels with alternate densities, the figure really isn't a good way to compare one fuel to the other, because ultimately what the consumer is interested in is basically dollars per mile, not miles per gallon. And so when I do my studies, I take in the energy density and they'll count and everything else. We have regulations, however, that because we come from a long history of 100% petroleum products running our vehicles, everything is denominated in miles per gallon. And that's where the regulators have to take a look at this whole issue and start making sure they fairly treat all fuels the same way. And like they do with electricity, they give electric vehicles a mile per gallon equivalent. Arguably the same thing should be done with alternate fuels like a mid-level blend should have an equivalent, because clearly they're not gonna have the same amount of energy in a gallon, but ultimately they save the consumer's dollars, they displace petroleum, they accomplish all of the goals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accomplish all of the goals that these various laws are written to achieve. We have a question here in the back. Can y'all say anything about the development of these fuels and as Zach does, I'm a AAAS fellow with the Energy Natural Resources Committee here in the Senate. Can you say anything about the development of these fuels from a production side or land use essentially and how that, the increase in fertilization, water, those sorts of resources is going to affect land quality, soil quality, things like that. Do those take into place? Because I did my graduate studies research on switchgrass in particular, which actually improved soil quality, but things like corn for ethanol. From my research have shown that they don't actually improve air quality, soil quality in general, and they take up more water, increased fertilization, and all the environmental issues associated with that. Deemed? Well, one of my backup slides that if you were really quick as Andy flipped through them, you might have noticed, the reason that going from a 10% to a 25% ethanol blend isn't as much of a problem as many people think is because over that period, the amount of total fuel that's being used, gasoline being used, is decreasing. So as you, even though you're increasing the percent of ethanol in that remaining fuel, you're not increasing the amount of ethanol that has to be produced by that much. There's a modest increase, but it's stretched out over a long period of time that likely can be addressed through improved farming techniques, improved yields, various advanced biofuels, and so forth. You've got a 30-year period in that window there that as it ramps up, and during that time, I think many of the problems you're concerned about would be addressed. So it's not like we're all of a sudden going to change all gas from 10% to 25% overnight, and we're doing it as the total usage of gasoline decreases as the fuel efficiency standards in these more efficient vehicles get out in the field. And also, while we didn't bring any slides on it, I think if you look at the data, there's less land being farmed in the United States today, although we're producing more corn and more soybeans, and fertilizer use has remained relatively flat. So moving into the future, well, and the other thing to point out, if you look at corn productivity over time, make a graph of corn productivity since the Civil War using USDA's data, about 1940, it just takes off, and it's never slowed down in terms of almost every year, productivity increases per acre. And while fertilization increased pretty substantially in the 70s and 80s, it hasn't really increased dramatically since then. So, while I think your concerns are really important from a big picture environmental perspective, I'm not sure how they really applied to corn agriculture in the United States today. Absolutely, there's improvements that can be made, but I don't think we're looking to go to E25 at a situation where there's gonna be a dramatic expansion of crop land or a dramatic expansion in the amount of fertilizer used. And I had another point that has fled my mind, but. I will say that DOE is doing some really interesting work on landscape design to kind of address some of those important, very important concerns on water quality, but we don't have anybody who is an expert up here today on that. Do we have any other questions, any questions over here? Thank you. Claudette Rosado Reyes, Office of Science, DOE. My question is in regard to the emissions. I saw data on carbon and of course CO2 and in general greenhouse gases. Are you assessing any changes in the product distributions when it comes to aldehydes and ketones that subsequently affect ground level ozone and of course air quality in low troposphere? So, during the mid-level blends program that we ran for DOE from 07 to about 2011, we tested tier two cars like the newest was 2009. We did see a statistically significant increase in acetaldehyde, which is to be expected with ethanol blending. It was a tiny, tiny number. It went from a tiny number to a statistically significant larger tiny number. And I think the point to be made is that if the fuel is a certification fuel and the manufacturers are building cars designed to use that fuel, they will meet the emissions and tier three emissions are remarkably low. So I'm confident the manufacturers will meet the emissions. If we go and test a car on the street with a fuel that wasn't designed to use, it may or may not have a change in its emissions but I don't think you can say that that's what's gonna be in the future. That's not indicative. Does that answer your question? We'll certainly characterize it in our experiments but I'm very cautious about making observations that something went up because I don't think that necessarily means that when GM or Ford or Chrysler or Toyota or Honda spend $100 million to bring a new product to market that they're gonna see the same emissions that we're gonna measure with our $100,000 budget. And I think it's also important to note that today compared to say the 1980s and early 90s, the most important factor affecting emissions of the car is the design of the engine and the emission control system, not the fuel. Sure, the fuel has to have low sulfur and meet certain minimum requirements but it's the design of the engine and emission control system and emission control strategy that have the biggest effect and so if the car is designed to run on E25, I think it's highly likely there would be no emission impacts from the fuel. Okay, great. Further questions? I have another question up front. Referencing to the previous question about land use effects and building upon what Robert Cormick just said, being somebody who is developing alternative crops for biofuels, I think, I mean, all of us, we have this list of things we're trying to do, decrease water use, decrease nutrient inputs. So I think in the next 20, 30 years, you're going to see not only increased yields on a per acre basis but you're going to see some really significant decreases on nutrient water inputs. So I think what you're really going to see through the increased demand for an E25 fuel is actually some really marked improvements in water use and nutrient use for the production. You have another question? No? No final questions? I had a quick question. So we were talking about octane today. And I think this question is mostly for Brian, but whoever else would like to address it as well. So what is the octane rating of regular gasoline? I believe it's 87. But then I'm also under the impression that there is 85 octane available in the United States. And can you talk about the impact of low octane gasoline and what that means in terms of efficiency in the United States? So 85-pump octane gasoline is available in high-elevation areas of the West because back when engines had carburetors and didn't have electronic controls, I guess they didn't need as high of octane gas. Today, if you look at every owner's manual, it will not say, no owner's manual will say put 85 octane gas in the car. I think there's significant data that's been published showing improved efficiency for modern cars running on 87 versus 85, but 85 is still allowed. My own anecdotal observation is that living in Denver, where we have 85 AKI gas, so it's only anecdotal observation. So my car runs way better on 87. So I'm a fuel geek, so I buy it, I pay more for it. But I do think if it was eliminated, there would be a marginal reduction in petroleum use in the United States, but it's not a very high percentage of the gas in the United States. I don't remember the number, but it's only a few percent by volume of the gas in the United States. What is the octane rating in Europe? I believe it's 92. It's research octane number, not the same pump octane number that we use. But it is a higher octane fuel, correct? I don't know the number. I think someone in the audience might know. I believe it's 95 wrong, this regular. Yeah. Do we have any other questions, final questions? We have one in the back here. Hi, I'm Jeremy Martin from the Union of Concerned Scientists. I just had a question for Dean. You showed in your economic slides a lower cost for all the cars across the fuels, and I wasn't sure where that meant or where that came from. Are you referring, I assume, to my contention, or at least my studies results that E10 on an energy-adjusted basis cost consumers less than an 87 octane E0? Is that your question? I just didn't, I mean, you had a line in the kind of stack there showing reduced cost for the vehicles, but it was actually the same for all the different fuels, and I just wasn't sure it came from. I'm not arguing with you, I just was confused about. Okay, that was from the part of the presentation that I had to truncate, where I got to talking about the Omega model, and that's the computer model that EPA uses for calculating the average cost to comply with the standard. And when you put the alternative fuel and high-octane or high-compression ratio engine vehicles into that stack of technology mixes, what happens is it changes the percentage of, for example, there might be fewer hybrids and more high-compression ratio engines. It's a technology that's used on maybe five models to get reduced to three models and the slack being taken up by this new technology. So when you put that all together and run the model, it's EPA's model that predicted that with this low-cost, high-efficiency technology added to their list of technologies, and if they ran their own computer program again, it would result in a reduction of the cost of the average vehicle. Now, we weren't allowed to change, I mean, Omega only calculates the cost for a given set of standards, and that was fixed in the model. So the output is in the form of the cost per vehicle to achieve that level of reduction. And so it shows that by adding that low-cost efficiency to the mix, you reduce the cost of a new vehicle. But of course, that is contingent upon having a fuel that doesn't increase the cost of the fuel. And so that's why it works with E25, but it doesn't work with the day's premium. Any questions? Another question up front here. Simply curiosity. Are you considering the utilization of different types of alcohols in your plants? The question is about utilization of different types of alcohols beyond ethanol, I believe. Thank you for the translation. Sure, within the Department of Energy's Co-Optima program, we're looking at four different alcohols at the moment, ethanol, inpropanol, isopropanol, and isobutanol. All of them exhibited octane or knock resistance properties that look like they checked all the boxes for knock resistance properties to be promising fuels for high-efficiency spark ignition engines. I'll just add a comment to what Bob said, and I apologize for not bringing it up earlier in my remarks. Most of the projects that I've done were focused on ethanol. Ethanol has great properties, but the Co-Optima program is about looking at the properties, not the chemistry. So while the chemistry affects the properties, the properties affect the combustion. And if we can get the same properties with two different chemistries, then the engine will perform the same. The chemistry's really not critically important. So I have this vision of a future where high-octane fuel is what my car needs, and what I get in South Carolina or Georgia might be different than what I get in Iowa. Maybe in Iowa it's 40% ethanol, and maybe in South Carolina it's 15% ethanol with some other products, some petroleum products or some other bioproducts, so the Co-Optima program has been looking at all these different formulations and characterizing the properties and how the properties affect combustion. And we've shown, I believe we've yet to show two different chemistries with the same properties that changed the combustion for conventional SI engines. Does that make sense? Do you mean same properties or similar properties? So the properties we know how to measure, like research octane number, motor octane number, sensitivity, heat of vaporization, and when we finally do, I call it, break the central fuel hypothesis that we pose in Optima. If we, when we find a chemistry that no longer holds that, then we're scientists, we're gonna wanna know what's the property we missed, and we're gonna go find another way to measure something about that fuel's properties would be my, that's what I think we're gonna do, but I'll let the co-chair of the fuel's team tell you. We are definitely trying to understand if the fuel properties we use, like octane number was developed in the 1920s, why would we think it would still work today, except it actually works pretty well today until you get to really, really high, high levels of turbocharging, and then maybe it starts to not work as well, and so we're trying to understand that, or is there a way to modify it? And so part of that is also, that would apply to any fuel, at least as we understand it now, but part of the project is also to understand, by using fuel chemistries that are much different than petroleum, which is what these properties were developed for, do our properties still work? So it's a test of our fuel properties to try different fuel chemistries and see if the properties still work. For the most part, they still do, but maybe not at the most extreme operating conditions. With that, I think we are out of time. If any of our speakers had any final s words they wanted to add, no? Okay, well thank you for joining us today in this ongoing conversation on a very technical topic, but interesting in terms of looking at octane and what the utility can be in the vehicle fleet. And I wanna please join me in thanking our speakers today.