 We're going to get started here this afternoon. So good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jesse Stollark, a policy associate at the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thank you for joining us today, especially during this busy end of year period. Our topic this afternoon is protecting public health through cleaner fuels and lower emissions. Over the past 40 years, our cars have gotten more efficient, and our fuel has gotten cleaner. But emerging health research on fuel additives and tailpipe emissions begs the question, are we doing enough to protect public health from these air toxics? As we'll hear today, it's critical to continue making progress cleaning up the cars we drive. 45 million Americans live, go to school, or work close to a major roadway, airport, or transit hub, breathing a complex mixture of air toxics that result from tailpipes. Not only is the transportation sector responsible for half of all toxic emissions in the United States, of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the US, 27% is from transportation, and more than half of that is from cars. We must address tailpipe emissions and greenhouse gases from cars in the near term. As we will see today to make progress in the transportation system, fuel quality is critical. Cleaner, higher performing gasoline can help to reduce petroleum consumption and reduce tailpipe emissions. Today, we'll discuss just one part of gasoline, but a very important part, octane. Automotive manufacturers have made significant strides in designing cleaner engines, but there is a growing realization that fuels must be part of the overall strategy. Just as the engine must be optimized, so must the fuel. Both automakers and the Department of Energy have expressed significant interest in the co-optimization of fuels and engines for increased efficiency and decreased air pollutants. We'll hear from a panel of experts on some of the health concerns regarding current petroleum-based octane providers, why automotive engineers want additional octane, and why ethanol is a better choice for octane. We'll conclude with the discussion of the work that DOE is leading on co-optimizing engines and fuels going forward, so that fuels and engines can work together as a system to produce cleaner, more efficient cars. Hopefully we'll walk away with a richer understanding of this complex topic, and indeed, why addressing fuel is important for protecting public health and the environment. Our first speaker today is Dr. Carol Kotowski. She is the Executive Director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Integrative Physiology. Dr. Kotowski developed scientific resources to address the health and environmental effects of chemical exposure, focusing on chemicals that affect the endocrine system. In particular, she studies chemicals that have impacts at exposure concentrations experienced by humans and wildlife. She also conducts research on air pollution associated with unconventional oil and gas production. Dr. Kotowski? Thank you, and thanks for the opportunity to be here and speak with you today. Good? What I want to talk about today is the growing body of evidence that calls into question the safety of the four chemicals known as BTECs. I'm going to talk about a review that we published in Environmental Science and Technology last spring with my co-author, Ashley Bolden. I just wanted to make sure the slides were up, and also with the late Dr. Theo Colborn. Dr. Colborn passed away at the age of 87 a year ago today. So it's very meaningful that we're here. She'd be happy to know that this research was going on to inform decision makers and hopefully protect future generations. So BTECs is an acronym for the four chemicals benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and the xylene isomers. They are all classified as hazardous air pollutants by the EPA, and they're also precursors to other known air pollutants like ozone, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particulate matter, and ultrafine particles. So there's really just one take home message that I want you to get from this talk today. And that is that these chemicals are in the air, most of us are exposed to them on a regular basis, and they're probably making us sick. BTECs come up from underground during the extraction of crude oil and raw natural gas. They are then refined and combined to make gasoline additives, used to boost octane ratings and improve engine efficiency. They are also used individually and together in a multitude of consumer and household products and industrial products. These include adhesives, detergents, solvents, paints, and pesticides. Also cleaning products, glue, nail polish, air fresheners. They're even used in toys and playground equipment. There are several different ways in which BTECs become air pollutants. They are released in tailpipe emissions from gasoline and diesel vehicles, and this is the primary sources. It's estimated that 90% of BTECs in outdoor air is from mobile combustion sources. They're also released at gas pumps and during the extraction and storage of crude oil and gas. And they volatize from household products, the ones that I mentioned contributing to indoor air pollution. And they also come from cigarette smoke. Most research into the health effects of BTECs has been done at high doses to protect workers, people who work with the chemicals in occupational settings. From this, we've learned that benzene causes cancer. Ethyl benzene is classified as a possible carcinogen. And we also know that at these high levels, they're associated with effects on the respiratory system and the immune system and also cardiovascular effects. They can affect reproduction and development and even cause severe damage to the nervous system and death. So we wanted to know if there were effects of BTECs at low exposure levels. This is in part because 25 years ago, it was discovered that common chemicals can interfere with our hormone or endocrine systems at very low concentrations. When exposure occurs prenatally or during childhood, these effects can be permanent, even if they don't manifest until later in life. In addition, prior research at high occupational exposures showed BTECs effects on some of the most classical endocrine outcomes, like altered hormone levels, altered menstrual cycles and reduced fertility in women, abnormal sperm production in men and spontaneous abortion. And I want you to keep in mind that hormones aren't just about reproduction and development. They're also involved in nearly every aspect of our functioning, including growth, aging, immune system responses, metabolism, cardiovascular function and behavior. We were also concerned because we knew that BTECs were detected in the air almost every time they're measured, usually at very low levels. They're detected in 90% of the samples that are collected. And exposure is so constant that they're readily found in blood and urine in the general population and even in the cord blood of newborn babies. When we looked into the literature to see how many effects had been done in controlled animal studies to determine the individual effects of the BTECs chemicals at low concentrations, there were none. These are concentrations we were looking for research into the concentrations of which people are generally exposed and there were no animal studies. We knew that there had been research in humans with looking at air pollution effects in human studies in the general population, but there hadn't been a comprehensive review of these studies to pull it all together. So the objectives of the study we published last spring were to identify all the non-cancer studies in humans at ambient exposure levels. It would have been, the study would have been twice the size if we also had looked at cancer effects. And to summarize the findings, draw conclusions and identify research gaps. We used rigorous systematic review methods developed by the National Toxicology Program to conduct the review. And in total we found 42 studies. You can see that most of them were looking at benzene. This is not necessarily because it's the most toxic, it's just the most well studied. And the reasons for this, there's any number of reasons why it's the most studied, but it's probably in part because it's been used extensively by the chemical industry since the early 1900s. It was a concern for cancer early on and health studies for that, detended to focus on benzene. It's currently one of the top 20 highest production volume chemicals and it's pretty much on everyone's priority list. And because of all the research that's been done on benzene, when the EPA began putting limits on it, it was replaced by some of the other aromatics like toluene and the xyleans, which we really just know less about. This is termed regrettable substitution. So this gives you an overview of the types of studies we looked at. Some of the research was done using personal air monitors, usually badges that are worn on people's clothing so that you can get an idea of the exposures that are right in the breathing zone. Other studies looked at indoor air levels, either in schools or homes. Some of them used outdoor stations and several studies looked at B-tex in the blood and in urine. Some studies, actually three quarters of the studies looked at effects either from penatal exposure in pregnant women or in childhood or adolescence. And then the remainder were looking at adulthood and in the elderly and there was some overlap there so the numbers don't add up. So I've got about five slides like this that look at the different outcomes that we found. They'll all have the chemicals across the horizontal axis, benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene and then if there are studies that looked at them combined that will be there too. And then the vertical axis is showing that you the number of study findings. The yellow bars, the ones on the left of each pair show you where significant effects were found for that chemical and that outcome. And then the green bars show where studies were done but the effects that were looked at were not found to be significant. So by far the highest number of studies were conducted on the respiratory system including asthma and lung function. Asthma was associated with all of the chemicals individually and combined. But you see that there were also several studies that did not find asthma effects. So this is a health outcome where it would be very useful in a follow-up study to do a meta-analysis that would explore why there are so many studies that found effects and so many that didn't and what the differences were. For the immune system, you can see again benzene had the majority of studies and exposure was linked to different effects including activation of immune cells as well as development of the immune system. Other chemicals were associated with things like eczema and food allergies. Now developmental effects are those that arise from prenatal and early childhood exposure. Benzene was associated with the smaller head circumference which is a measure of fetal growth and increased risk of preterm birth. All of the chemicals were associated with reduced birth weight. Although for toluene and ethyl benzene, the significance was marginal and we put them down as no effects. The low birth weight findings are really important because being born underweight has been linked to a variety of chronic health conditions including heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. So this is somewhere where it really highlights the fact that these low exposures have effects that are less dramatic than cancer but there are things that can really negatively impact a person's health throughout their life. When we looked at reproduction, the only studies that we found were done in benzene and the effects were primarily sperm related including low sperm count. For the cardiovascular system, there were a couple of studies looking at cardiovascular disease and benzene was also associated with things like reduced blood cell counts. There was also one other study that looked at benzene and found it to be associated with increased risk of insulin resistance. I didn't make a slide because it was just one study. So that was a quick overview of the results that are published in the research. I also wanna talk a little more specifically about concentration levels that we found in these studies. On this graph you can see for the yellow bars that shows the lowest effect level at which we found a study showing effects in that chemical. For example, for toluene at seven micrograms per meter cubed, there were effects on some physiological effect in the research. And the green bar show you the level that EPA considers safe for exposure. You can see in particular for toluene, their level is 5,000 micrograms per meter cubed. So it's a huge gap. The reason for that is because most of the research conducted by regulatory agencies is done at really high doses. And then they extrapolate down to try to come to a level that they feel would be safe. They don't actually test those lower levels. So this 5,000 micrograms is a level considered to be safe based on higher doses that caused probably cancer. So another thing you should know is that there has been research looking at even one microgram change in exposure can lead to a lower odds of a low birth weight. So a little bit makes a big difference. So for our conclusions, it's pretty clear that BTECs are associated with health effects at the low levels to which people are exposed on a regular basis. Most of these studies were done in children. We know that children are at risk for permanent changes in how their bodies are formed and function when exposure grows early in life. And this research also suggests that levels considered safe by the EPA may not be protective. So for our recommendations, we recommend removing or limiting the use of BTECs in consumer and industrial products like gasoline and other transportation fuels. BTECs don't actually accumulate in the body the way lead does or a lot of other chemicals. So reducing the sources of exposure has the potential to really decrease the body burdens fairly quickly. Again, this won't do much good if we substitute it with something that is potentially, also potentially harmful that we just know less about. Oops. So really what we need is safer alternatives, ideally chemicals that do not have biological activity. And that concludes my talk. I wanna thank my co-authors and the staff at TEDx for supporting this review. I would also like to thank our funders at TEDx and the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for giving us this opportunity. And of course, all of you for attending. Thank you. Thank you Carol for that overview of the health research on these octane providers, the BTECs. And what I wanted to mention also is that the BTECs complex is about anywhere up to 25% of every gallon of gasoline. So it is really very troubling to hear about these health effects at very low exposure levels that you're talking about in terms of the literature that we have already. So next we're gonna hear from Dean Drake. Dean is the president of the DEFORG Group. The DEFORG Group specializes in analyzing the economic impact of environmental regulations for automotive and energy industry clients. Prior to founding the DEFORG Group, Dean was at General Motors for 34 years, most of which he spent in corporate public policy. At GM, he spearheaded many innovative environmental initiatives, such as the first formal policy dialogue between GM and environmental groups, as well as the Cash for Clunkers program. In 1989, Dean initiated and planned the GM conference on global warming and also represented GM on the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Dean? Well, thank you for inviting me and it's a pleasure to be here. As the title says, my talk is going to be on ethanol-gasoline blend fuels an automotive perspective. And right off the bat, I need to explain the title because both are a little bit confusing. Why ethanol-gasoline blends? Well, I've been in the industry long enough. I started my career when we were taking lead out of gasoline. Then I was there when reformulated gasoline was implemented. And even later, I saw changes to gasoline regulations and I saw gasoline change. It is always changing. But the one thing we don't hear about is probably the biggest change in 40 years. And that is that gasoline, as we know it, isn't gasoline anymore. It's a mixture of 10% ethanol and 90% gasoline. And this major change in fuel went unnoticed and fortunately for consultants, very much unexamined. So I got asked to do this talk and then the EESI also said I should present the automotive perspective which again gets confusing because there are no 2016 the fours running around on the roads. So what qualifies me to be an automotive expert? Well, I'm actually representing quite a few people all of which are consultants and all of which had some association with the automobile industry, particularly the company that the former company that was known as General Motors. There's now another company known as General Motors but it's a completely different animal. But we were all part of the old GM. I was with GM as Jesse mentioned for 34 years and I won't go through my history because I think she did a great job with that. And I started in 2007, the DEFORG group and along with myself, I work with, I have an associate, Tom, Dr. Tom Walton, who's 25 years of GM as a director in economics and two years with Federal Trade Commission. Dr. Mike Winahan who is also an economist. I like the jokes since GM now has one pH economist and I have two that I have twice the number of economists that GM does. And then Dave Aldorfer who was a director of stationary source emissions and as a master's in environmental science. In addition for a study we did for Minnesota, Minnesota Corn Growers Association a number of years ago. We teamed up with Tom Darlington who has 25 years combined in EPA and General Motors and started his own research firm called Air Improvement Resource which is a major expert source of expertise in emission modeling. And Transportation Fuels Consulting, Gary Hurwick who 35 years at GM and started his own company on retirement is now quite our recognized expert in alternative fuels and particularly ethanol. So when we say an automotive perspective I think we can humbly say we got the lumps to prove that we know what the automobile industry is thinking when it comes to fuel. Now what does the automobile industry want? Well that's fairly easy to answer since the answer has been the same since Henry Ford discovered you could make an automobile a mass consumer product. And that simply is that the automobile industry wants to ensure that the benefits of owning individual personal transportation outweighs the cost. In other words it wants to maximize the value of the product to the consumer. And everything the auto industry does or the positions it takes in policy matters is an effort to try to either minimize the cost and that includes social externalities like pollution and minimize the cost or maximize the benefits or combination of both. We want that scale always to be on the side of the automobile. Which brings me to this gasoline ethanol blend we all have been living with but very few of us really know that's what we're putting in our gas tank. It's called E10 which simply means it's a mixture of 10% ethanol. Now E10 has been around for a long time. I even have a picture of a car fueling up with it in the 1930s. So it's nothing new. And in fact in the 1970s it had its own name. It was called Gassel Hall and it was used during the Arab oil embargo when gasoline was scarce. Became very popular because it was one way to actually get fuel at an affordable price. Well because of the renewable fuel standard now nearly all gasoline is E10 and you can see the profound impact. If you look at the chart on the right there we have gone from virtually no ethanol, minimal ethanol in Gassel Hall to the point where we're producing above 14 billion gallons of ethanol every year. We've gone from almost no gasoline ethanol in the gasoline pool to 10% ethanol in the gasoline pool. This is a major accomplishment that has happened with virtually no public awareness or recognition whatsoever. If you would have told me 20 years ago that I'd be up here and saying that 10% of the petroleum used by American drivers in gasoline would be replaced by ethanol I think you're crazy. How would we ever get enough ethanol to do it? Would people accept it? How would it all work? Well it turns out it worked very well. The refiners for one thing, the whole infrastructure for making fuel has changed that period. It used to be refiners made gasoline shipped it to their own retail outlets, their own brand stores and sold it to consumers. Now refineries no longer do that. They no longer really own that many outlets and they produce not gasoline for sale to the consumer but a blend stock, a sub-octane blend stock that gets sold to blenders. This blend stock isn't legal. It isn't illegal gasoline until you put 10% ethanol in it because ethanol has very high octane rating, about 113. So when you take this blend stock, add the 10% ethanol, you now bring it up to 87 octane for regular or a premium blend stock, you would bring up to 93 octane. But the stuff that shifts from refineries really can't be put in the gas tank. So this is an entirely new system for producing liquid fuel. So the question that we had started with is a question, this all happened and nobody really asked what was the impact on the public going from no ethanol into gas to 10% and the two obvious questions for the automobile industry, what was the cost of the consumer and what was the effect on the environment. Now I'd love to be able, wait a minute, I will actually go to the economics. Now the economics study here, I've done a lot of literature research and I haven't seen anything close to the level of detail that we've gone into in the last two years looking at this. To begin with, we have started looking, we've used oil price information service prices, actual data, some of the best available in the industry. We followed it weekly for nearly two years to try to determine what the effect of ethanol is on gasoline. Now I need to add the cap and the conclusion is my headline, ethanol makes gasoline less expensive. Now I have to add, it makes it less expensive since the end of 2011 and the reason for that is that the end of 2011, the ethanol industry was profoundly changed. The direct subsidies, production subsidies for corn ethanol were eliminated by Congress as well as any protection, tariff protection from imported ethanol. The result was an entire transformation of the conventional ethanol industry, forcing it to compete with the price of cane ethanol coming in from Brazil without any government subsidies. And as a result, the whole production system transformed itself. So before that date of December 31st, 2011, ethanol cost more than gasoline on average. Since then it's cost less. And that really is what has made ethanol a bargain in gasoline. So what we have looked at is we've looked at the, what we consider the four major parameters, differences, impacts that adding ethanol to gasoline can have. The first of course is the price per gallon. Is ethanol more expensive or less expensive than the blend stock? The second one is the cost of transporting. It costs more to transport ethanol than it does gasoline because gasoline shipped in pipelines. So you have to take that into account. The octane rating, the blend stock has 84. Ethanol is 113 octane. You're trying to get to 87. And finally, the energy density. Ethanol has less energy than gasoline. So in order to compare the prices, you have to make that adjustment to change the price of ethanol blends to reflect the amount of energy, basically energy adjusted. So we've done that and using the opus prices and came out. And the way we did it, I thought was rather clever. Perhaps I wouldn't think that because I thought of it, but there is no E0 to compare this to, but to do this right, you have to compare it to E0. So we recognize they produce regular blend stock that goes to the blenders and a premium blend stock that goes to the blenders. If there was a request for an 87 octane gasoline without ethanol, the only way they could produce it is by blending the regular blend stock and the premium blend stock until you brought the resulting gasoline up to 87. That gave you a very clear baseline and we then could go ahead and compare the effective E0 to E10. And what we found out is four cents per gallon. Average is how much you say a consumer is saved over that time period as a result of ethanol being added to gasoline. Now you might ask yourself, that's not a lot of money, four cents per gallon, but Americans consume over 100 billion gallons a year. So as the late Everett Dirksen once said, a million dollars here and a million dollars there and pretty soon you're talking real money. And in this case, you're talking about four to five billion dollars a year, and that's why consumers save because we have gone to an ethanol blend rather than just pure gasoline. Now, I'd like to directly move into the environmental effects, but unfortunately I have to take a little detour and talk about computer modeling. Not exactly one of my favorite subjects, but it's important to understand where we get the data that we use when we do environment study, environmental impacts from automobiles and different fuels. In this particular case, it started with something over here called the EPAC study, which was a research study run by EPA, the oil industry, ooh, I gotta do this in three minutes, so I have to do this really fast. Okay, and the oil industry, and I'll just say that while it was a great research project, it unfortunately had some problems because basically what they did was they came up with 200 different blends of fuel, over 200, with different properties and everything, but none of those fuels really matched the fuels that were sold to the public. They were entirely research things, and the EPA wrote a couple of SAE papers, Society of Automotive Engineers, that said, you know, if we'd done it differently, we would have got blended it differently. We had to make choices, and if we did it differently, we would have gotten different results. They did another study and found while ethanol increased emissions in two thirds of the cars they tested, there's no change in the other third. So they said, well, you know, maybe cars and fuel and everything else are blends, so we can get, you know, we can't really tell whether the ethanol caused it or not. Now all of those problems were transported into the computer model, and I'm gonna talk about the second that we used to actually calculate the environmental benefit. And because of that, there are some caveats, and I'm gonna have to move quickly to the next slide. Basically when we tried to look at what E10 did to the environment. Now using the flawed moves model, and I won't get into too much detail here, but the things that are controlled by regulation, there were some slight increases, but the really important thing is the adding of 10% ethanol to the gasoline as you would expect significantly reduce the uncontrolled toxic emissions that result in the health effects that Carol talked about. So adding ethanol is a good thing, and I'll let you read the rest of that so I can get to my last two slides. So why am I here? Now Rubin will cover a lot of this so I can go real fast through this slide. Basically higher octane is needed because auto industry has run out of good low cost ideas for improving fuel economy with 87 octane gasoline. As you can see, these are EPA numbers on the right, and this is the cost curve, percentage reduction on the bottom, cost per car on the top. The things that are really cost effective in that lower left-hand corner have all been utilized will be completely utilized by the time it reached 2025. If we're gonna make further progress and still have cars people can afford to buy, we can't ignore the one box we haven't used, which is high efficiency engines. In order to make the high efficiency engines, you have to be able to go to higher compression ratios which requires higher octane. Now the oil company's answer to that is to use premium, today's premium. We still wanna make the car affordable for people to drive. And as you can see by this chart, you can't really make it affordable if you have E10 premium gasoline required to be used in all cars. Fortunately, there's an alternative, which is something that the government calls super renewable premium, which is 25 to 30% ethanol blend. Oil industry doesn't have to do anything to keep same blend stock, you blend more ethanol, and you come up with a fuel that has the admirable properties of the cost of regular and the octane rating of premium. So we can take what we learned from looking at E10 and extrapolate forward that the logical path to the future is going to be by increasing the percentage of ethanol and gasoline. And this probably will be the next big transition in fuels. And hopefully I will get to be part of making that happen. So what we envision happen, and I think there's a lot of people in the auto industry share the same vision, is that over time, with the help of our friends here in Washington, we would see E10 regular gradually go away to be replaced with a new regular of 30%. Once industry learns that this is the pathway, they will start making all vehicles that they produce capable of running on 30% ethanol, even if they don't get the improvements to improve the efficiency in all of them right away. By the time that E10 goes away, most of the cars will be designed to build to run on E30. Many of them then can go the next step and have those higher efficiency engines. Meanwhile, what few legacy vehicles are out there can run on today's premium. They would pay a penalty. But the one thing, and I'll conclude with this, the one thing the automakers have to have is the floor of octane brought up to 93 and the low octane fuel taken off the market. Because if our experience with unleaded gasoline improved anything, it's that if there is a lower cost source of fuel, the American public will use it. No matter what kind of tricks we put on the car and no matter how often we try to tell them, use the more expensive fuel or you'll ruin your engine. And the consequences of using an 87 octane gasoline in a car that's designed to use premium gasoline by changing the compression ratio is the result would be basically you'd ruin your engine. It wouldn't take long. And the automakers don't wanna be in a position where they would be held responsible for something like that happening. So 87 octane has to go away. The question is whether it's replaced with an affordable ethanol blend or whether we have to use premium. Thank you Dean for that overview of the economics of ethanol blending and how ethanol blending can positively impact air quality, particularly some of the compounds that we're talking about today. So finally we're going to switch directions a little bit and we're gonna hear from Reuben Sarkar about the Optima program at DOE. Reuben is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Transportation at the Department of Energy. At DOE he oversees the energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transportation area. This includes the vehicle, fuel cell and bioenergy technologies office. His portfolio includes projects that seek to reduce oil dependence, avoid pollution and create jobs through the manufacturing of petroleum alternatives as well as more efficient cars and trucks. Previously Reuben worked for Protera, a manufacturer of electric buses and charging stations and Reuben also started his career at General Motors where he's part of the team designing the Chevy Volt. Reuben. Okay, thank you. So I've designed this to kind of move at a fairly fast clip and at a very, very high level. And I'm not sure how familiar people are with Octane and other things. So maybe afterwards you can ask any clarifying questions that you may have. But when we got started on this endeavor it was really around the fact that there was fuel economy being left on the table in today's engine designs because they were limited by the availability of high performance fuels in the market and that we knew that we could find a new optimal point if we just designed engines and fuels and tandem together. And this is something that automotive industry has been saying for quite some time and it's something that there's a tremendous amount of data to support that there is a place that we can move ourselves to that you can mass produce engines in the market today and have significant improvements in fuel economy. And so this is a major effort across a number of our national laboratories and transportation offices. Just to frame this up a little bit more broadly though I'm in the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy. And we're organized around three different sectors for sustainable transportation, renewable power and energy savings and efficiency. And in the sustainable transportation sector which is the sector I oversee we cover all of the portfolio for technology. So electrification of cars, fuel cells, bioenergy and so forth. So all I'm gonna talk about today is the optimization of fuels and engines but oftentimes people ask me the question well what about the other technologies? Well we have the other technologies too this is just one subset of the work that we're doing. So what I wanna just talk to you about is our goal of bringing to you better fuels and better vehicles sooner and into the market taking science off the shelf and making it into our roads and into our retail fueling stations quickly. I think that we have acknowledged that internal combustion engines are gonna be around for quite some time. They are the workhorse powertrain of our industry and although we'll continue to see electrification take place we think that the engine's gonna be here for decades to come and so we need to make sure that we're taking advantage of squeezing out all the efficiency gains that we can. We know that you can make engines more efficient whether it's a spark ignition engine, a compression ignition engine or an advanced combustion engine there's significant headroom available still to boost the performance of engines and to do so using technologies that automotive companies are comfortable with and are tooled to manufacture and to produce. So higher efficiency, lower emission engines are possible today and we know that it's the fuel in many cases that actually constrains the design of the vehicle today and so for those of you who are not familiar engines are designed to be tolerant to the fuels that are on the market today. They're actually designed to the lowest common denominator of fuel that's on the market today and so anybody who's been to Colorado knows that they have 85 AKI fuel, Rocky Mountain Fuel, they call it and everybody in the country has to design an engine to work to that lowest common denominator fuel which brings down the performance for everybody and so we just did an example here that said well what happens if I just boost the octane or what we call the Ron value research octane number it's not the same thing you get at the pump for a Ford EcoBoost engine without changing things like the compression ratio and others and what you can see is just changing the octane by about 10 points gives you a significant boost in your peak load that you can push from the engine and your peak efficiency from the engine and this isn't using any sort of new technology today it's just tuning the engine to operate on high octane fuels and so we know we can boost performance this way and we know we can do so predictably and this is kind of a conservative statement we can do quite a bit more if we design fuels in tandem. We also look in our portfolio across a couple of different kinds of combustion strategies I won't get into the nitty gritty here but spark ignition is normally what you think of when you think of a gasoline vehicle that has a spark plug it requires a certain kind of fuel property to avoid knock in the engine then you have compression ignition engines which are your diesel engines they auto ignite when you compress them and then we have future technologies we call kinetically controlled combustion technologies and the fuel properties can have an effect on all of those we're looking at increasing spark ignition engine efficiency as well as trying to take that technology into the future of advanced combustion where the fuels will also have a role to play and so what's the opportunity the opportunity as you heard today was to co-optimize or design in tandem fuels and engines together and to do so with a very specific focus about making this fuel available in the market soon and so not just having a paper published or a study published that says E30 mid-level blends provide benefit but to be the convening authority to work with the different agencies and the different offices to say that how can we make this actually transpire into the market faster and we know that there's a significant gain that can be had from a focus in this area so just to give you a few little visuals around what this could imply our ultimate goal long term is by way of fuel efficiency and use of alternative fuels through the Optima project as we call it is to actually reduce the vehicle petroleum consumption by about 30% using co-optimized fuel technologies we think that we can get around seven to 14% just from engine efficiency maybe up to 15% and then we think that we can get another 15% or so just from displacement of petroleum fuels and so as we work our way to our 2050 goals we can take a fairly substantial wedge out of our endgame just by looking at engines today another way to look at it is we have our 2050 targets in terms of how we're trying to lower greenhouse gas reduction and we're gonna do a tremendous amount on electrification on light weighting on fuel cells but the reality is you need more than just that to get all the way down to the deep carbon abatements that we need and so Optima actually is required to help us get all the way down to the finish line with combustion engines today and I quoted a few numbers but I'll just give you the endgame for this project right now we think that by 2025 we can gain an additional 15% fuel economy from spark ignition engines just by putting high performance fuels and engines in the market and that's in addition to an additional 35% that we already have in our research portfolio so we think 50% fuel economy improvement can be gained from spark ignition engines and 15% of that can come from just co-optimization and another five to 10 we think can come from using advanced combustion and so it's a meaningful number sometimes people think that 10 to 15% doesn't seem like a lot when you think about EVs and the big numbers you see but the reality is these will go into mass produced engines these will be deployed in mass there are some car companies that will tell you that they will make every engine this way if they have the fuel readily available and the issues that you mentioned about misfueling and others are addressed. A little statistic to understand why it's important now it takes 17 years to turn over our vehicle fleet there's 240 million vehicles out there and in order to have a fleet ready by 2050 you gotta start introducing engines and technologies by 2030 and in order to introduce things by 2030 you actually have to have the solutions ready right about now and so this is a real time-sensitive thing it's not about inventing a fuel and then thinking 15 years down the line it's about trying to move the ball sooner, faster and so what is our approach that we're taking? We're breaking down and again we call this the Optima project and the Optima project is a multi-lab, multi-agency multi-office initiative that's broken into roughly five pillars in terms of how we're tackling the problem to be an end to end solution not just developing fuels in the lab but actually finding our way into the marketplace the first step of our process though is to actually determine what is the best fuel that we want to have available what makes a fuel a good fuel? There's been a lot of work done in this area but we haven't seen a full comprehensive study done as of late and our goal is to go through and I won't expect you to memorize this but it's to go through the 50 or so performance characteristics of a fuel and reevaluate which of these ones really move the dial on fuel economy we know that research octane called Ron is a significant enabler but we also know that there are other properties like flame speed or heat of vaporization and others that you can turn the knob on as well and that you can boost performance and so our goal is to do an objective scientific study and then to come back and say what are the big things that really move the dial on fuel performance? And then in addition to looking at fuel performance we're gonna look at not only the characteristics of the fuel but the different ways that you might be able to make it whether it's a blend stock a biofuel refinery intermediate or an additive and then this is a cartoon in terms of the color ratings here just to give you an example but then we also wanna look at the things that we talked about earlier today in terms of what is the GHG intensity what are the other trade-offs or impacts we have the land use, the health effects to scalability not wanting to invent chemicals and products that just aren't scalable in the marketplace and so this is really meant to be not only a best performing fuel but all around best performing fuel when you think about all the metrics that matter all the way down to the infrastructure to deploy the fuels into the marketplace and so in order to get there we know that not only do you need to have the ideal fuel properties you wanna make them from the lowest greenhouse gas pathways and so part of the Optima project is gonna hinge largely on biofuels but we have not closed the playing field to other opportunities to produce it but we're gonna look at what are the biochemical pathways that you can use to make octane and then some and then what are the low carbon petroleum derived alternates that we can make we're not opposed to natural gas to liquid technologies if people can show us that the benefits are there but again they have to show that the benefits are there and then ultimately we wanna find out what molecules are gonna provide us these desired sets of properties and as you shown earlier some of these molecules may or may not be the desirable ones if they're up on this chart it's not because we recommend them it's just to say we're gonna canvas the universe of molecules and we're gonna come back to the set that provides the right performance the right greenhouse gas abatement the right scalability and the right health effects and we started off this way because earlier you had heard it mentioned that we had done some work into mid-level ethanol blends we had our renewable super premium study and a lot of people asked well why don't we just start with that E25 to E40 is pretty good to go it's a way to get cheaper premium fuel in the market now and we said well we have a good starting point so let's start there and then let's canvas more broadly let's do a very objective study and let's determine if there's anything else better than an octane or not and if not we have a very good starting point and if we find something beneficial we can build on what we already know ultimately though our goal isn't to just be a science project and to invent new chemicals and to design things in a lab that can't get to market and so the point of Optima is really to make sure that we tie together the loose ends with the retail market and make sure that this fuel actually gets down into the market and so we have specifically added aspects of market barrier and market transformation into our research and are engaging with places like the National Association of Convenience Store Owners and the people that physically will be the ones to sell the fuel to ask them what makes a fuel valuable to a consumer and what will make them want to go put it in the car and then how is this going to be beneficial to their business to sell a fuel that's competing with some of the other gasoline fuels that are available and so as I mentioned earlier this is an end-to-end study that takes into consideration a variety of different factors ranging from what kind of performance we can get from the engine and what kind of greenhouse gas abatement all the way down into the infrastructure the health effects how do we work with the legacy fleet often times when we talk about bringing a new fuel to market you'll immediately hear people have the guttural response it's a very hard thing to do have you thought of all these things and the answer is we have thought about all those parameters we haven't answered all of them but it's part and parcel to the research to make sure that as we go forward we think we have enough degrees of freedom that say it's not impossible to put a new fuel in the market we've done it with ultra-losal for diesel we've done it for other fuels and that we completely believe that we'll be able to find something that meets all these criteria and that helps advance fuel economy so who are the stakeholders as I mentioned earlier Optima is a multi-lab, multi-agency, multi-year new initiative and by new initiative it's covered within our portfolio today in our fuels and our engine research but it's new in that we've raised the profile of it and made this kind of a joint effort across our vehicle technology office and our bioenergy office and we brought together seven national labs all with varying expertise on aspects of this project in a consortium that we think is going to be a significant enabler in terms of bringing new understanding and new learning to the area of octane and fuel performance beyond DOE we've also been engaging with EPA and USDA and other agencies to see what their interest is and bring a new fuel to market we can't get there without EPA in terms of getting a fuel certified and based on what we've seen today I think they're very receptive to the approach that we've taken which is to try to develop a fuel performance specification that allows companies to use different kinds of technologies to meet enhanced octane requirements and then have those fuels available in the market under their own branded metric and that EPA would simply provide kind of the certification requirements to produce a fuel to that specification we've also actively been engaged with industry on this this is not being done in a vacuum through our US drive partnership through our US car partnership we've actually had many many meetings engaging with the automotive companies so that they can provide input in terms of what they see are the key enablers to bring in a new fuel to market again one of the things that's always brought up to me is the challenge and the difficulty in doing this and so part of our role at DOE isn't just on the science it is really to be the convener across all of the agencies when I asked my staff earlier when I came in why aren't we doing this because there was a lot of published papers on the subject there was a lot of papers that said there was value here people thought it was extremely heavy lift and what better opportunity for a federal agency like DOE to step in this role and to bring together the agencies and the other labs and the industry together to help tackle this problem so what's the plan this is kind of the tactical plan that we have FY16 was the first year that we made a request under the moniker Optima it was a 27 million dollar request across the vehicle technology office and the bioenergy technology office as I mentioned it's not new research we've been doing foundational work in high-octane fuels and renewable super premium fuels ahead of this but it was the first year that we brought under the banner Optima and it kicks off or has kicked off at the beginning of FY16 and it focuses on two different thrusts that we have the first thrust is on spark ignition engines so the kinds of engines that most of you drive today and our goal is that within the next 18 months so by FY17 we're gonna know yes or no whether we think we found something better than a mid-level ethanol blend or not or whether we think mid-level ethanol blend is good to start and that we can build on it from there and then in parallel with that we're gonna be doing a longer-term research project on advanced combustion which we think ultimately a specialized fuel can enable advanced combustion for those of you who know what advanced combustion is it's very finicky in terms of how the fuel ignites and how the fuel burns and so having a very tailored fuel can be an enabler there and that'll also help us to squeeze out much longer-term gains further down the road but our goal is that by 2025 we're gonna know and have fuels available lockstep with engines that will be taking advantage of these kinds of characteristics and there's nothing to say that we can't move there faster but that's again 10 years to fuel in the market it's a pretty aggressive timeline and so ultimately what are we after? You know if those of you familiar with Energy Star our goal is that Optima is not necessarily a fuel specification and that we tell you what the formulation is what we wanna do is to put a specification out there that says if you meet these performance characteristics if you have these well-to-wheel emission characteristics and if you have these compatibility limits in terms of how people can design the car and you have these health and safety effects you can sell a fuel under the Optima banner because we know it'll perform and meet the requirements and our goal is that a sticker and may not be called Optima because Optima's already being used here as a fuel name but it'll be on your gas cap it'll be at the pump and it'll be in your owner's manual and people driving the car will know that their fuel needs to run on Optima and as you heard earlier today what I find the most interesting thing of all is that if you took an E30 blend today it's actually a cheaper fuel than regular so you get premium fuel for cheaper today if you go to the pump right now and you buy premium it's 50 cents to a dollar more if you go and buy an Optima fuel in the future you're gonna get premium fuel for less than regular and that's actually a game changer and when you think about it in that context if you have an engine designed to operate on that fuel and so again our goal is to bring you better fuels and vehicles sooner and to do them designed in tandem this is one of our major efforts that we have in the Department of Energy and that we're moving very fast and purposeful on getting this out there into the market, thanks. Thank you Rubin for that overview of Optima and in the near term of what we're looking at for some of these challenges and opportunities in switching fuel blends so now we have about 30 minutes and we're gonna open it up to questions from the audience if you wouldn't mind stating your name and affiliation then I'm actually gonna repeat the question so people watching remotely can hear the question as well. Do we have any questions? Bill Brandon. So the question is about fuels and testing under extreme conditions versus average conditions. It's about this tricky effect. Many people have tried to, let me get this on, oh there you go, all right sorry. Many people have tried to measure this effect to see whether it's there or not. We think it's there, we have some data that says it's there and so the answer is yes we're gonna be looking at those higher load conditions in places where as you saw in my earlier chart fuel performance starts to become differentiated. When you actually look at the low end of load on an engine you don't see as much effect of octane it's really at the tail ends of performance so we are gonna kind of start on bench level testing and then scale it all the way up to full engine testing and then make sure that our test parameters cover that space that really measures where the impact is but we'll also have to bring it back down to a fuel economy cycle, right? Cause that's where the benefits measured so it's gotta have benefits on a fuel economy cycle as well. Any questions? I would have to go back to the down select process I know our goal is to get the 20 fuels that we're gonna test this year that kind of cover the map out the horizon. We're not concluding that ethanol is the answer we know it's one good opportunity. I will have to follow up on whether methanol is being considered there. I know what you're talking about there are some who have approached us and said why do we care if we can just program the controller to flexibly use the fuel? So I don't think methanol has been excluded by any means from the process though. But I'll check. I actually have a question for you Carol. In terms of looking at the next steps on the health literature, where do you see as to the next step? What are the gaps both in terms of V-tex but just an endocrine disruption research in general? Okay, in terms of the gaps in the research I think there needs to be quite a bit more work done on the actual exposure sources. So we know that we're exposed to a lot of different chemicals and a lot of different scenarios but it's not clear without products being labeled in terms of what's in them and what's being used to create them. We don't know where the exposure is coming from. And there also needs to be a tremendous amount of work done to look at the health impacts of most of the chemicals that have been studied which have only been studied at high exposure concentration. So we're looking for more research on low exposure levels and particularly for the way that the safety standards are set to be revised so that they take that into account without making the assumption that lower exposure levels are more safer, less harmful. And this is one of the hallmarks of endocrine disruption is that you can get effects on the endocrine system at these very low levels that weren't anticipated from traditional toxicological testing. Great, question? So then I have other questions. Dean, you mentioned really briefly splash blending of ethanol. Could you explain what that is and why that's important? Okay, there's two real ways. Turn on your mic. Okay, does this work? Yeah. All right. When they did the APAC study, they did what's called match blending where if you add ethanol in order to keep other parameters the same, you have to change other chemicals in the compound because gasoline isn't a compound, it is a soup of stuff that happens to come out of a barrel of oil. And so how you mix and match them has a lot to do with the properties, in properties of the gasoline. Splash blending is a little bit different and that's what they do with ethanol. You take a blend stock, you match blend, a blend stock so that when you add ethanol, you get the properties you want. Splash blending means taking that E10 then and going forward and adding more ethanol. For example, an E15 gasoline is E10 with half again more ethanol in it. And so you don't change the properties of the blend stock, you change the gasoline by adding more and more ethanol, which is what is splash blending. So in that sense, you can increase the ethanol percentage and the octane of gasoline without having to go back and change the core blend stock. It can stay the same superchemicals it is today. Doug? You know the V-tex is in there for octane, so to what you just said, I was gonna ask this before you even said that in the input. And Ruben, as you look at the criteria as you gauge these things, we pretty much established that V-tex is in there for octane. We need octane, V-tex is a bad thing, so let's make sure we don't put more V-tex in or for any toxic compounds in our octane. Shouldn't that move the health effects and those concerns a little higher up on your criteria? I don't know how you gauge the, you know. So I'm gonna just repeat the question for our, that's okay for our audience that's not with us in the room. First question is about where is the health criteria considered in terms of the Optima program because there's a lot of various criteria considered there. The second was on various mechanisms to increase ethanol content, including FFV credits, flex fuel vehicle credits, and other mechanisms that could be used to increase ethanol volumes in the short term. Who ever wants to go? One I'll chime in first. So, and I'll try to, I think you had kind of a three-part question. So I think on the first piece, health effects are certainly important. You know, DOE's mission is on energy and greenhouse gas abatement. And the purpose of the Optima project was to improve fuel economy and lower greenhouse gas emissions without introducing additional health effects. So, you know, you can create the same carcinogenic molecules from biomass as you can from petroleum. So you don't wanna necessarily go down that avenue. So it's a mitigating factor. I don't have the exact answer in terms of how we've dialed it in in terms of that selection getting made, but certainly something that we would consider. It would be more along the lines of another agency that has oversight, like EPA or others, to dial in the health effects piece on those components. But we can bring that into our conversation. It's not definitively DOE's mission space on that. The other question you asked was on, let me, yeah. Well, they will though. That's the thing. I think, I mean, cafe is cafe, right? And so if this is available, they will get credit. The credit's already there for this type of solution we're talking about. The additional credit might be to incentivize them to produce flex fuel vehicles ahead of a deployment of new engines that are optimized, you know, things that tolerate mid-level ethanol blends, but the actual credit mechanism is there on the high-octane fuel side of it. And they would actually bring engines to market today based on the current structure if the fuel were readily available. And that's their big push is we need the fuel widely available and then we can make the engines widely available as well. No, it's fine. Okay, a couple of things. A lot of your questions really related to the revolution that we've had by adding ethanol into gasoline. Unlike unleaded gasoline or RBP or RFG or some of the other changes to gasoline, the change to 10% ethanol just happened as a gas hall became essentially a universal fuel. And many of the regulations that are out there, the minutia, have not responded accordingly. There hasn't really been an effort to look at this E10 and say, okay, as a product, how does that affect things like RVP? And if you go from 10 to 15 or 15 to 30, what kind of regulatory changes do you need? And as Rubin referenced, we had FFV credits that were there for improved fuel economy and so forth. But if it turns out the Optima study shows that we need a higher blend, middle level blend, and we're gonna go that direction, then FFVs take on an entirely different perspective. It's they're needed not because you need them to burn E85 which was the original idea behind them because oil companies were essentially given a choice. You could do it through E10 or E85 to get your credits. Now you may need to think of what kind of credit mechanism you need for automakers to get FFVs into production to lay the groundwork for this new fuel. So a lot of things have happened in the marketplace and so forth and really the regulatory end of the business hasn't caught up with it. And I think part of the challenge that Rubin and others in government are gonna have, especially in these days of limited budgets, is trying to catch up and getting the regulation so they don't artificially inhibit the evolution of fuels. Another example is E85. There's a whole new method of producing and distributing E85 called direct retail that unfortunately there are a lot of obstacles in its way. It's a very market-driven thing because people, I filled up my car for $1.40 a gallon. People love this stuff but there are regulatory impediments and antitrust impediments that are in the way of this expanding of the government needs to look at this too. So the government can really help in this regard. So I just wanted to add that the field of study of this phenomenon, endocrine disruption, is only 25 years old, but actually people have been exposed to endocrine disruptors at least since early 1900s. We have several generations of people exposed in utero and we also have this phenomenal rise in outcomes that are associated with endocrine disruption like asthma, diabetes, obesity, reproductive problems, ADHD and autism. And so this is something that is on par with climate change and really deserves the kind of high priority attention that climate change is getting. Yeah, I think I would have to get back with you on the exact details of that. I know that we have a lot of experts on land use change and how we account for that. And if you would like, I can follow up with you on it. I don't know off the top of my head what would be the exact approaches that we would be taking there. So the question was, are your health studies looking, the health studies that you looked at looking at ultrafine particulates in their role in terms of aromatics and the role of formation of ultrafines? It's a really good question. I wish I had a good answer for you, but no, we haven't looked into those at this point. So I'm gonna ask Ashley if she knows they are okay. So Ashley's saying yes that the BTECs are on that initial priority list. The pace of the endocrine disruptor screening program, it started in 1996 and basically stalled a couple years after that and they really made very little progress for a long time. More recently, they've finally gotten going again. Their focus right now is on in vitro testing, so looking at cell-based assays and trying to tackle as many chemicals as possible with these very basic tests to see what's going on with receptor binding in the endocrine system. They are, it's gonna be a big job to keep up with the number of potential endocrine disruptors. We have a list that we post on our website now that is over 1,000 potential endocrine disrupting chemicals. And so we also need to be looking at the independent scientific literature and what that's saying about effects that are happening in humans and also looking at laboratory research. Any further questions? Carol? Well, we've been talking to people at the EPA and had conversations with them about our concern and there have been other scientists and endocrinologists who are approaching the FDA to get them to be more concerned about this. But really the agency that's taking the lead is the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and they're doing a lot to support both intramural and extramural research on endocrine disruptors, trying to fund science that's gonna answer a lot of the outstanding questions. One of the chemicals in particular, bisphenol A, is a plastic monomer. It's the component that people say BPA free water bottles, it's in water bottles, it makes plastic hard, it's in a lot of, it's one of the highest production volume chemicals out there and millions and millions of dollars were spent to study it, to use, to come up with this comprehensive approach to being able to look at its endocrine disrupting properties in a way that regulatory agencies would be able to use the information. And despite that, I mean, all the studies haven't totally been published yet, but it wasn't the most successful effort and there's still a lot of hurdles to getting even that one chemical regulated. So, you know, industry's heavily invested in some of these products and keeping them on the market and some of our research has looked at substitutes for things like bisphenol A and found that the substitutes are potentially just as bad and we just know so little about them and you can't spend millions and millions of dollars on every chemical that's out there. So, the whole approach really needs to be revamped and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is working to make inroads in that. Second question from Carol. Well, I think there's been an extremely high standard of proof to show that some of these chemicals are toxic in order to take them out of common products like that and so a couple different approaches would be to say, we've got evidence now that these are not good and if there are alternatives, there's a lot of people looking into alternative assessments to say, regardless of what your level of proof is that you have now, if there are safer alternatives, those should be chosen even now, not waiting for decades of research to show like lead that it was how harmful it really was and what now, I mean, it's a classic endocrine disruptor and there is no safe level of lead exposure and I lost my train of thought on my other. Yeah, if it comes back to me, I'll answer you, okay. Any final questions? Do you, since we have a few minutes left, any of you have any final remarks or things that you'd like to address that you didn't get a chance to talk about in your presentation? No? So the question, I'm just gonna repeat the question, it's about the moves model and what Dean saw as potential flaws in the way the model was conducted. Wow, let me get to that slide, there we go. Well, basically, as I was explaining, gasoline is the soup of chemicals and when EPA wanted to do this EPAC study, this test program to figure out what the impact of changing the levels of these various compounds would have on the output coming out the tailpipe. Well, first of all, I should mention it was a very small program by historical standards when the auto industry and the oil companies got together to run a research project in late 1970s to determine the effect of one chemical, MMT. It was a 63 car fleet. EPA was trying to determine the effect of all of these different compounds on a 19 car fleet. Now admittedly, there are ways of using statistics to improve the sampling, but clearly, when you're trying to test that many variables with that few vehicles, you're gonna run into some problems and then part of the problem they ran into was simply they wanted to maintain the drivability numbers. So when you added ethanol, they had to take something else out in order to accommodate those drivability numbers. Well, what they chose, many people think, made ethanol look worse than it would have if they had blended it differently. That's one issue. The other issue that they have is that the vehicles they had, about a third of them didn't show any response or very much response to ethanol being added. And that was the case of the vehicles, how the vehicles were calibrated and how the emission control system and the computers reacted when they sensed the ethanol in there. Did they change certain parameters to accommodate for it or didn't they? So it's still not very clear what effect these various chemicals have on the actual fuels you get in the field because none of those were tested in this 19 car fleet. Rather, they were these experimental match blends that were provided by the oil companies. So EPA tried to make accommodations for that when they put it in the moves model, but it's a little bit like repairing a toaster and doing all the tests afterward except trying to make toast with it. They never did actually test the fuels that you have in the field and see what actual effects they had on, tailpipe emissions of these various chemicals. So that makes the moves model a very imperfect model for both analysts and consultants like Tom Darlington to use, but it's the one you have to use because it's the most comprehensive. Keep in mind we're talking a mega model, maybe not as big as a climate model, but it's still huge. It's not something you can do on a laptop. So you have to use the moves model and even more importantly, states have to use the moves model when preparing their state implementation plan, trying to prove to EPA what they're going to do to reduce ozone, for example, would actually work. Well, there's a lot of reasons to believe that by adding more ethanol to the existing blend stock, what's sort of called splash blending into E15 would reduce ozone emissions from cars, but that's never been tested sufficiently to allow that to be included the moves model. So that would be a very low cost thing for states to do to meet the new ozone standards, but because of the way the moves model was made and the way the EPAC program was run, they don't have that option in their tool bank and we're all going to pay for it with the things they do have to do to comply with the new ozone regulations. So I don't want to get into too much detail because unfortunately this whole issue of EPAC and the moves model and everything has gone into court. And there's one thing I don't want to do is to get a subpoena. But basically I think that the technical people are in agreement, there's problems with the EPAC study, the way it's being interpreted. They tried their best to put this little results from this little 19 car fleet into the moves model. It probably needs looked at again so that when you decide to do a study that shows what the effect of adding ethanol or any other property is, it'll give you reasonable results. It doesn't seem to do that now. So there's a lot of work ahead and there's a lot writing on it. Okay, one final question. Well, maybe your experimental area is South Dakota where the South Dakota Farm Union has voted to support you, where you've become an analyst vote and they're trying to set up a site around some city. Water can, there you go. If they get the grassroots, we'll show you. Well, one of the, I read about that and one of the things from an auto perspective I worry about are those cars that were never designed to run on E30. It doesn't take much. If you don't harden the vehicle for above 10% ethanol, it could be a dimension on a fuel pump or something. And they could do themselves more harm. I'll go out on a limb here, looking at it from an automaker's perspective. They could be doing themselves, the cause more harm than good if as a result there are some cars that show themselves to have problems simply because they weren't designed to run on that fuel. The bottom line is fuels and cars have to be designed in conjunction with one another, which is why I think what Ruben's doing with the Optima program is so great as it's a recognition, it's a system. And any final comments from our panelist? I did wanna finish up answering Carol's question because I remembered what it was I was gonna say. We were talking about what happened with lead and how we could avoid that in the future and I was saying that there was a high standard of proof and there are efforts going on, for example, with the Reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act to flip that so that the burden of proof isn't saying how harmful are the chemicals, but before they're introduced into the market, you're actually making people prove that they're safe. And so that's something that really needs to be a high priority and I'm happy to see that health is being considered in the Optima program and I hope that it does take a high priority like that. Great, thank you. Well, join me in thanking all of our panelists today. They think they did a great job. And we will have our presentations online shortly and the recording as well, so check back in a couple of days if you want any additional information and thank you for coming.