 Good morning everyone, my name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and We are happy to welcome you to this briefing this morning and to also have as a partner for this briefing the governor's biofuels coalition So our top the topic before us this morning is future fuels can biofuels make gasoline cleaner and cheaper This morning we are going to hear from Four experts from our national laboratories who have been doing research in this whole area looking at fuels Looking at combinations of fuels looking at life cycle greenhouse emissions looking at fuel performance Looking at the overall efficiency of fuels the efficiency of engines and how those things all come together Which all can become quite complex. I think as any of us who start to read materials and background articles journal articles in terms of any of these areas and So we think that this is a very timely topic and an important issue to bring before All of you whether you are in congressional in congressional offices Federal agencies or in the overall policy community because clearly we need to really expand our understanding of What does make sense and what do we know with regard to fuels which are a very important piece of Obviously our whole transportation sector. It's what makes our transportation sector run as we all know and at the transport sector is Still a very very major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and all of this becomes a very very important Area to really closely look at as this country and countries around the world Look at how they are going to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as the countries of the world all make commitments to each other As we move forward in the international climate negotiations negotiations So I want to introduce our speakers this morning They will be providing a unified presentation and therefore I will introduce all of them at the same time First we will hear from Dr. Robert McCormick who is the principal engineer with the fuels performance group at NREL the National Renewable Energy Lab Dr. McCormick is the platform leader for fuels performance at NREL and The group that he leads at NREL is focused on biofuel utilization Particularly looking at fuel properties fuel quality standards fuel engine Interactions and fuel effects on air pollution emissions He'll be followed by Brian West who is the deputy director for fuels engines and emissions research center at Oak Ridge National Lab and he has been supporting Department of Energy research for more than 25 years on vehicle fuel economy alternative and advanced fuels engines and emissions control technologies Then Callie Johnson transportation market analyst with the National Renewable Energy Lab and In Callie's role as a transportation market analyst He is assessing the economics of advanced fuel and transportation Technologies in various applications locations and policy environments and Our final speaker before we open it up for discussion with all of you is Dr. Michael Wang Who is the senior scientist for energy systems at Argonne National Laboratory? Dr. Wang leads the systems assessment group at Argonne and he is the original greet LCA or life cycle analysis model developer and he has been continuing to lead This very very important greet model development at Argonne and he has been analyzing biofuel greenhouse gas Effects for 20 years and Michael is very much the go-to guy with regard to greenhouse gas emissions and life cycle analysis with regard to biofuels and fuels overall I also want to mention that we are hopeful that Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth will be joining us if she is able to get here She will be coming Towards the latter end of the briefing. So whenever she does arrive We will just stop right then and so that she can speak to us and and then reason So at this time I want to now turn to dr. McCormick to start us off Because as you can see when you just hear what all of these people are covering That there are so many issues that are all intertwined and it's important to get for all of us To have a better understanding to get a better handle on this and what this really means for it for all of us Well, thank you very much Carol and thank you all for coming today. It's Great to have this opportunity to talk to you about our work on high-octane fuels Especially high-octane fuels that are mid-level ethanol blends and how they can be leveraged to design more efficient engines This this work that we'll talk about today has been a collaboration of three US Department of Energy Laboratories So it's a pretty big complex effort Today we'll have I'll give a brief overview of what is octane number. What is engine knock why you might want to care about those things? Ethanols high-octane properties and also I'll talk a little bit about Mid-level ethanol blends compatibility with refueling infrastructure Brian West will go over high-octane fuels and their benefits both in flex fuel vehicles and in dedicated optimized vehicles Callie Johnson will then talk about The hurdles to introduction of high-octane fuels and also introduction of new vehicles and we'll talk about our simulations of vehicle adoption and biofuel production supply train Simulations as well and then Michael Wong of course will talk about greenhouse gas emission impacts So a lot of what I'm going to talk about is really introductory information that sets the stage for what my colleagues here will talk about as All of you have probably purchased gasoline before and you've seen these these yellow numbers on the gas pump I imagine the pump octane number and This number is actually the average of two different octane numbers measured in a special engine just for measuring Octane number under two different conditions that 80 more than 80 years ago when this was all developed Were intended to span the complete range of engine operating conditions? Well today engines have changed a lot and most Experts in the field don't think this makes that much sense anymore And it's really just one of those two octane numbers the the research octane number or the Ron that really predicts performance of fuels and engines and for a high for a high octane fuel Many folks in industry as well as the national labs think that it needs to have a Research octane number of about a hundred a run of about a hundred and that would translate into in today's pump octane Into a value about 95 So I've talked a little about octane number and engine knock The fuels today generally all have a pump octane number of 87 The vehicles today are designed to operate on that fuel But if you had a lower octane number for some reason you'd experience what's called engine knock And I want to try to take a second to try to explain what that is So in a spark ignited engine a gasoline engine the fuel and air are mixed together and then they're ignited with the spark plug So I'm not much of an engine expert, but I think even though you guys aren't engine experts I think you can you know that your engine has a spark plug And then what happens is a flame essentially burns away from the spark plug and consumes the fuel and air Releasing a lot of heat it gets really hot but if there's an area of unburned fuel and air before The flame front is complete if it gets too hot and the fuels octane number isn't high enough It can auto ignite which is essentially an explosion in the engine This can this is engine knock and this can damage the engine Pretty severely now most of us have never experienced engine knock But I would think that my grandparents if I if they were still around and I asked them about engine knock They would know exactly what I was talking about But today we don't experience it because the fuels meet the minimum octane requirement the cars are designed to run on it and then the cars have knock sensors and sophisticated controls That change the way the engine operates if they sense engine knock long before the driver could even detect it But these changes that the that the engine's computer makes to how it operates to avoid knock also reduce the fuel economy of the engine So why why would that be important to you if you're interested in Developing more efficient engines with reduced greenhouse gas emissions There's a long list of strategies that you could you could go with but here we list four of the most important increasing compression ratio downsizing and down speeding slowing down the engine And turbo charging all of these are really important strategies for making the engine more efficient But they also all increase the temperature and pressure inside the engine So if you had a fuel with a higher Octane number because of the higher temperatures and pressures You could use these strategies much more aggressively in your engine design to go after even higher fuel economy gains The last engine design strategy that we list there direct injection involves injecting the fuel directly into the cylinder Where when the fuel evaporates into the air it cools everything down a few degrees and this this provides even more knock resistance and This is actually very important for ethanol So Ethanol has Some very unique properties as a fuel has very high research octane number of a hundred and nine But it also has a very high heat of vaporization So when the fuel evaporates in the engine you get a much bigger cooling effect for a Middle-level ethanol blend or a high ethanol fuel than you get for conventional gasoline. This is actually worth As much as two to three Octane number units this additional cooling that you get from ethanol So it's it's the octane number of ethanol plus the the cooling Another point we want to make about ethanol and octane numbers is on this these blending curves here When you blend ethanol into gasoline at low levels You get a pretty big pretty big bang for your buck You get a pretty big response But as you get up towards e40 you get to a point of diminishing returns where you don't get quite as much octane For each unit of ethanol that you put in And also ethanol has about two-thirds the energy content of gasoline So you're you're reducing the energy content and not really getting that much octane So we've focused our work on e25 to e40 blends to try to stay in that range where you get a big octane effect And then the e25 number actually has some benefits from infrastructure compatibility perspective that I'll talk about in a couple of minutes So we have A need for more efficient engines we can use high octane fuels To develop more efficient engines and ethanol is a really great way to get to high octane fuels That all sounds great, but we don't want to minimize the challenges to introducing a new fuel. It is very complicated to introduce a new fuel There's EPA Clean air act requirements safety and infrastructure requirements The need to have to demonstrate fuel engine compatibility and have fuel quality standards and in the case of high octane fuels actually to develop and market Optimized vehicles to take advantage of the octane number Which leads to this last constraint the need to coordinate investments in vehicles by refineries and infrastructure You know nobody's going to build the cars if the fuel is not there Nobody's going to make the fuel if the cars aren't there to burn them. How do you overcome the chicken egg causality dilemma? So there are some challenges, but there appear to be pretty substantial benefits both in terms of vehicle efficiency reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the the the tank to wheels Area and also the opportunity to put a lot more ethanol into the fuel market Which is a low carbon fuel reducing greenhouse gases in that domain So the three national laboratories represented here have undertaken a scoping study to try to better define more quantitatively what the hurdles are proposed resolution to those hurdles and Quantify the benefits the potential benefits a little more directly and Recommend future R&D if it's if it's warranted so to kick that off. I'm going to talk a little bit about Infrastructure compatibility we've collected a fairly large amount of information about underground storage tanks over the past couple of years and It's pretty apparent that the vast majority of underground storage tanks that have been Manufactured and installed for the last several decades are compatible with any ethanol blend e100 But not all of them just the vast majority and so the issue is that most of the the fuel retailers are small businesses that only own one station and They're not required to keep records of what they've got underground and so most of them have no idea whether their tank is compatible In order to sell a blend over e10 they have to be able to conclusively demonstrate that their tank is the right tank To hold this fuel now that can be done They need to bring in an experience experienced inspector to look at their system and figured out probably cost them a couple thousand dollars But that that is one of the hurdles that would have to be overcome The second hurdle is that e10 which is conventional gasoline dispensing equipment is not going to be compatible with these higher ethanol blends But there is available a UL listed Retrofit for these pumps to make them compatible with blends up to e25 it costs about five thousand dollars the So that's why we've picked e25 as one of the blend levels. We're looking at because The infrastructure barrier to introduction of that fuel appears to be a bit less than if you go higher Where you have to purchase the retailer would have to purchase an e85 pump which costs about twenty five thousand dollars a much more significant investment for a small business So with that I'll turn it over to my colleague Brian West to talk about vehicles and how they perform with high-octane fuels Good morning. Thanks Bob and Carol appreciate the invitation to be here So I'm gonna talk about some of the vehicle and engine work that's going on We're we're being funded by DOE to do a lot of this work and we're working very closely with some of the auto manufacturers Who are providing hardware and even funds in in some cases? So Bob talked about down speeding and downsizing. I'm gonna try to explain to you a little bit In a geeky way of what that is As Bob said we can make more torque and power with a higher octane fuel and An ethanol as he said is very effective at boosting the octane number. So this graph. I'm showing here This is what we call an engine map and on the y-axis there is it says indicated mean effective pressure That's an engine geek number for torque from a single cylinder research engine. So So think of the y-axis there is torque and The x-axis there is engine speed if you've got a tachometer in your car, you know what engine speed is That's our p.m. That's how fast the engine is turning So what I've got here outlined in red is the engine map for this Pontiac Solstice engine with its factory 9.2 to 1 compression ratio and 87 octane gasoline It's a it's a great engine and it does its job and that's the engine map you have if we raise the compression ratio to 12 to 1 I get this smaller gray area here outlined in red now So we've severely limited how much torque and power we can make by raising the compression ratio We've made the engine more efficient. We're just not making as much power So this is this would be very troublesome to drive and this is why the manufacturers one reason They don't make optimized FFVs They can take advantage of the octane of the 85 because they still have to protect for the the lowest available octane So with 87 octane and 12 to 1 compression ratio your engine is very limited However, if we change the fuel to this high octane e30 So we take an 87 octane gasoline at 30 percent ethanol It boosts the run to 101 in this case now We've doubled the available torque from this engine with the 30 and why that's important It's lines of constant power look like this So in today's engine you can imagine you might be over here at 2800 rpm cruising down the road making the power You need to push your car down the road and in the future engine What we want to be able to do is slide up this curve to the left and that's what we mean by down speeding So if we can if we cut the speed in half we have to double the torque well Obviously in that little gray area, we couldn't double the torque. We can't go there but we can go up here with the green fuel and And the reason that's important is because the best efficiency points on the engine map are up here in the upper left Corner so we want to live there as much as we can That's where our fuel economy comes from So that's what down speeding is about downsizing also would be you know because we've got this big engine map there We can either put this engine in a larger vehicle or we could make the engine smaller So if we make the engine smaller, that's downsizing we can make the engine smaller with this fuel with high compression ratio and The consumer would buy a car that performs like today's car, but would have much better efficiency So increasing the torque with the the fuel in the high compression Enables down speeding and downsizing gives you better fuel economy. This is for future vehicles, right? So we're gonna talk a little bit about how we might get that fuel into the marketplace But what's exciting Bob talked about the the energy density of ethanol is two-thirds of the energy density of gasoline and What's what's exciting here is in the 25 to 40 percent range We think the efficiency gains can overcome the energy density loss So you get the same fuel economy in this future vehicle with this fuel that you would get in today's cars But producing less less greenhouse gases So every gallon of ethanol used in this way would displace a full gallon of gas And I think that's that's the really exciting thing about this So let's talk about flex fuel vehicles for a second I think you're all familiar with flex fuel their cars that are designed to use any blend of gasoline from from any blend of Ethanol from 0 to 85 percent There's over 17 million of them on the road today Unfortunately, they don't consume a lot of ethanol they consumed less than 300 million gallons last year Which is about 13 gallons of the 85 per vehicle per year The reasons for that are numerous But one of them is the the tank mileage the energy because of the energy density and because the vehicles are not optimized for the fuel They get lower fuel economy. So here's certification data from EPA for hundreds of flex fuel vehicles This is the E85 fuel economy on the y-axis and on the x we have the gasoline fuel economy This is E0 gasoline its certification gas You can see they got about a 27% loss in MPG when you when you run them on E85 and that's one reason I think consumers shy away from it if the price isn't right then their cost per mile is actually higher So consumer acceptance is key, of course if we're gonna have a new fuel in the marketplace and people don't buy it Then it's it's not gonna do us any good So we did a small study to see if we could develop market pull You know, what if we could get flex fuel owners to want this mid-level high-octane blend Then they clamor for it the retailers put it in and then when the fuel is virtually everywhere Then the manufacturers can build dedicated cars for it like I talked about on the previous slide So what we did was we took four late model flex fuel vehicles and we did what we call a wide open throttle test I'm sure all the young people in the room have done this before you you step on the gas You basically put the pedal all the way to the floor and this would be representative What you might do when you're trying to merge out here onto the the beltway so And we so we did that test with the 87 octane e10 and then we did the test with a hundred Ron e30 And what we found was that three of the four vehicles had a significant performance improvement And this isn't about racing. This is about being able to safely merge on to the interstate, right? I mean if you if you have a little bit more power and you've got an extra 20 feet or so at the end of that on ramp That means you can safely merge into traffic instead of having to step on the brake and start over So what's really exciting here is that with with the e30 in one of the vehicles We got the same performance improvement that was in the automotive press for a very similar vehicle with the 85 And that just highlights this non-linear octane blending that Bob mentioned earlier So this is this is important for two reasons one is you know Can we get the the flex fuel owners to want the fuel so that they use the fuel that would move more ethanol if half the FFE is used e30 half the time we consume an extra half a billion gallons a year of ethanol That's about 4% of what we use now That'd be a significant increase the better than that is that if you once you establish this Wide range availability the fuel then the manufacturers can build cars that are designed to use it So one more little experiment we did we had a Ford Fiesta eco boost in our lab recently This is it's already has a downsized engine. You've probably heard of eco boost This is the kind of engine that would certainly take advantage of a high-octane fuel and I'm going to demonstrate how that it does This comes from the factory with a one-liter three-cylinder turbo charged gasoline direct injection engine So there's are all some of that alphabet soup that Bob talked about in his earlier slide about the kind of technologies That we would expect to see on these future vehicles And we noticed in the owner's manual it says you can use regular in this car But for severe duty service you'll get better performance with premium and we also noticed that Ford authorizes the use of e15 in this car So what we did was we we blended 87 octane e0 with 15% ethanol and what that did And increase the Ron as you see from from 91 to 98 so a really big increase in the octane number but it did it did impact the The energy density as we would expect it drops at about five and a half percent So if the car was not optimized at all for the fuel you would expect about a five percent loss in miles per gallon Okay, so we ran it on these three different tests one's called the city test one's a highway test And one's this real high load aggressive US-06 test it's called and what I've plotted here is the relative fuel economy So the gray bar is the gasoline fuel economy divided by the gasoline fuel economy. So it's one So all those gray bars go to one the red line is this 90 94 and a half percent energy density difference that we would expect So we should we would expect the green bars to be down there at the red line You can see they're all above that why because the engine is more efficient with this high-octane e15 So much so that on this high load US-06 test we had a four and a half percent efficiency improvement So this is that volumetric fuel economy parody that we're talking about and and it's important to point out that e15 to e0 That energy density difference is the same as you'd see between e25 and e10 So he tends ubiquitous across the country now if we had a high octane e25 We believe that future vehicles could get the same fuel economy as today's cars so in closing To demonstrate that further we have a dedicated vehicle project. I don't have any data to share with you This is underway. I hope to have data toward the end of the year General Motors is supporting us here We're in the process now of Designing pistons to put in this Cadillac ATS is equipped with a 2-liter Turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine again the kind of engine that can take advantage of this kind of fuel So I'll be real excited to be presenting these results in the coming months and with that I'll yield the remainder of my time to the distinguished gentlemen for Colorado All right, so based on what Bob and Brian have said so far this sounds like quite a promising fuel But it doesn't do us much good unless we can get it out into the marketplace. That's what I'm going to talk about And so for market assessment What we did was we the overall purpose was to assess the feasibility the economics and the logistics of Adopting high-octane fuels, which I'm going to use the unfortunate acronym of Ha for now I'm not just clearing my throat And so we want to check we want to see this feasibility from four perspectives the four key stakeholder groups that need to adopt this one of them is the the fuel providers That laser pointers are working on the far left You have the fuel providers both the biofuel and the gasoline providers and the middle you have the Refueling stations the gear gas stations You have the drivers who need to adopt it and you also need the auto manufacturers that need to produce the vehicles And so the strategy to check To assess the market potential was to identify the benefits to each of these key participants because each one of them needs to Benefit from it somehow in order to in order to adopt it Then went on to identify the hurdles of of half adoption Because and so to do this we did a literature search and we also did extensive interviews with Representatives from these four key stakeholders We then proposed resolutions to the hurdles and then we we grouped a bunch of those Resolutions together according to what were compatible with one another or even synergistic with with each other and Came up with eight market scenarios for how this could be rolled out We then Modeled the market scenario is in a couple of different models to to test kind of what Bob was talking about about the The chicken or egg do you get the do you get the fuel out there the vehicles out there first? And so that's what these models helped us do we ran it through the Vehicle adoption model which helped us find out under what conditions The drivers are going to purchase these vehicles and how many of these vehicles they're gonna purchase And then we took those vehicle numbers and put them in a in a fuel supply chain model To kind of see you know if there are these vehicles out there. How could the fuel be produced and supplied? So to start with the benefits that the different stakeholders would would see The the one of the primary benefits to the drivers are potential fuel savings So what this chart on the lower right-hand corner is is if you look back back in time if if e25 and e40 had been blood had been blended from retail e85 and e10 These are the prices that it would have cost and you can see that there are pretty decent price savings throughout the entire decade and then EIA projects Those price savings to continue into the future And then so not only is not only is half less expensive But it also has reduced volatility which volatility really kills a lot of business plans and hurts the economy So you can see you can see that whenever whenever fuel prices spike e10 Which is what we're using now spikes a lot harder and higher than e25 or e40 Another advantage for the for the drivers is increased torque in performance applications That's increased acceleration or increased towing capacity Which we all like and then there are the energy security and environmental attributes, you know You'll you'll have to import less petroleum from the Middle East But there's lower greenhouse gas emissions lower criteria pollutants Things like that that a lot of the drivers appreciate And then the V the vehicle manufacturers also stand to benefit from from Hoff One of the benefits is the lower greenhouse gas emissions, you know as they have Pressure on them in various forms to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions This is going to help them to achieve that that overall goal that is going to continue into the future and Then we have increased they also benefit from the increased torque in performance applications The fuel retailers benefit because Hoff could fetch higher margins So so a profit margin is the difference between what the fuel retailers pay at retail and what they sell it for and In the profit margins are notoriously low for gasoline because it's such it because it's Such a cost competitive market. What other what other product? Can you drive down the street or like on the on your way to work see five different price signs saying okay? You know you can get the exact same product or as far as most consumers know the exact same product at five different places You're just going to choose the one that is one penny less And so so that's that's a kind of a central conundrum of being a fuel retailer Is there's just not much they can do to increase their profit margins? But if they adopt Hoff and they're the only They at least at first. They're the only retailer Within a certain area they they can they can eke out a higher profit margin Potentially because they there isn't as much competition nearby and then Hoff can also differentiate state stations in the uniform market Stations really that's one of their that's one of the central ways of the try to compete with each other is Pointing out ways that they're different from one another in this very uniform market And so if they adopt Hoff they might they might be seen as being kind of more technologically savvy or cutting-edge Especially if it's kind of marketed as a performance fuel and then people might might prefer that station over the neighboring stations and Then finally the cheaper fuel could result in in an estimated three percent increase in trips to the convenience store just based on the price elasticity and the and the cost savings and Then the fuel producers could benefit because it would help them comply with the renewable fuel standard It would help them achieve economies of scale for cellulosic ethanol which in rules Done some studies into the how price competitive Cellulosic ethanol is and it's it's it's Eddie It's really well positioned right now in terms of the technology being able to deliver price competitive ethanol But we don't have the economies of scale to bring about that price competitive aspect and so And so half could potentially bring upon those economies of scale to really bring the the price of that of cellulosic ethanol down and then it could also enable enable lower octane blend stocks which which are cheaper and and then One more is that it also enables an export market for these fuel retailers if they're sending less of their petroleum and refinery products To to the US markets they can they can expand into international markets So Now we've seen that like all of the key parties could potentially benefit from half We we kind of dug into the hurdles and then the resolutions of adopting it and so after a literature review and interviewing the representatives from from industry we kind of came up with with 30 central hurdles which Sounds like a lot sounds kind of intimidating But but we also came up with 94 potential resolutions that we identified categorized and discussed we We categorized them according to According to how formidable they are and if they're show stoppers are not if they're if they're not properly addressed And so this table just shows like the first tier the first of four tiers and then we also we also categorized them in Cordy according to what type of hurdle they are the logistical regulatory behavioral or economic and then we also kind of we identified Which of the stakeholders is going to be primarily impacted by by the hurdle So then when we had those 94 potential resolutions, we grouped them into to eight market scenarios for ways that it could possibly be rolled out and and then we put it in our our vehicle market adoption Simulator to see if people would purchase these vehicles and under what conditions and so what that chart on the left is is That's the overall the the black line at the top is the overall total number of light-duty vehicles in the US and then The colored lines that are rising are the are the various scenarios of when people purchase the vehicles How many of them how many half vehicle vehicles are on the road as it increases over time? And you can see we we started at at 2018 which may not be realistic But it's good to have it as as close to possible because then the the parameters in in the model are more concrete And we started them all at the same time so you could compare them side by side rather than having various delays And so I won't jump into that into the spaghetti there where Where the different scenarios are increasing? But I will point out some highlights some lessons learned from The combination of the scenarios and contrast between the scenarios So overall all the scenarios achieved a substantial percentage That's between 43 and 79 percent of light-duty vehicle stock by 2035 so that's that's that's a lot of vehicles out there that that's encouraging And then more of these vehicles are adopted if half as e 40 Because they offer the consumer greater fuel savings and they offer they offer the vehicle manufacturer greater greenhouse gas benefits and Then you have a $2,500 purchase and incentive which the incentives were one of the one of the parameters that we tested out And we found that a $2,500 purchase incentive boosted the 2035 market penetration Almost a third in the consumer determined scenarios and that consumer determined scenarios Points out one parameter. I want to point out to you guys is from the auto makers point of view They they could either determine the the models such as the Ford Fiesta ahead of time and just convert them all over to Convert them all over to half ahead of time or they could wait and see where the consumer demand was and then convert part of their model over ahead of time and so So that brings us to our final the final point where designating certain certain vehicle models to be converted It leads to a higher adoption rate But but early adoption speed depends on the model production volumes, you know So so are you are you converting over the f-150 which has a lot of vehicles? Are you converting over a pipe Porsche 911 which doesn't sell many vehicles? So we took those number of vehicles that are Projected to be out being used in the marketplace put them in the model of our fuel supply chain and the overall results We're pretty encouraging the pre preliminary results show potential half consumption of up to 30 billion gallons of of ethanol in 2035 under the scenario month the scenario is modeled and so to put that in into perspective This was you know, the 30 billion gallons was a That was 120 billion gallons of a fuel which was about 60 percent of the overall fuel sold to light duty vehicles in 20 in 2035 so we're talking At least for that most successful scenario. We're talking pretty significant market penetration and However, all scenarios are limited by one thing or the other and so that's what I'm calling bottlenecks here and so we through our Simulator we we tested where are the bottlenecks? And so the foremost bottleneck was the fuel retailers investing in Hough equipment in the dispensers and underground storage tanks that limited that was the limiting factor in most scenarios Unless they were incentivized to to invest Unless the equipment cost is reduced or if only compatible equipment is sold in advance you know if if if and what that means is that for years before half was introduced if When their equipment retired they could only replace it with half compatible equipment Then when half came around it was pretty cheap for the refueling station owners to adopt it So for the scenarios where the investment wasn't the constraining factor the construction rate of new but by refineries limited the market because It takes a lot of resources to build a new biorefinery and ramp up and so and so for a number of scenarios Particularly before 2025 the the biorefinery couldn't quite catch up to the potential demand And then for the scenarios or after 2025 once they did catch up then the limiting factor was half vehicle adoption Which is the number of vehicles out there on the road as we talked about in the previous slide And it's important to note that the feedstock availability now This is the majority cellulose again and all the feedstock availability and costs are not the limiting factors in any of the scenarios And so that is the market assessment now I'm going to hand it over to Michael Wanda long to talk about the well well the wheels analysis Thank You Kelly and so you're of course. We all know one of the Motivations for biofuels in general and the new transportation fuels and Vehicle technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions And of course to introduce half with a central plan They are some your debate about the potential trade-offs of the engine efficiency again versus a potential refinery Efficiency penalty so overall our well-to-wills Analysis address these potential trade-offs to see if we Indeed or achieve for greenhouse gas benefit by consider all the factors together Are the engine efficiency side? Bob and Brian already present to the potential efficiency gas and why we anticipate the efficiency gas in our Analysis in this project the last line in this table This is the base of the teams assessment of the technology and the testing result from Oak Ridge that we decide the In the in our base nine analysis we decide the five percent efficiency gaze are are reasonable Your assumption to use all the other had if we look at the potential downspeed the down Downsized engine and other technologies together We see the potential it can get to up to 10% efficiency Again, so we built the 10% as a sensitivity case together with the five percent efficiency again And you see some other studies completed in the past several years as there are There are assessment of the potential vehicle efficiency again So your our scope is to put the petroleum refinery Changes together with the vehicle efficiency gas together to see the overall effect So your I war your specifically our well-to-wills Tasks our approaches to do detailed refinery modeling to see what type of changes we Participate in refineries in order to produce half We address two critical issues in our Refinery modeling why issues Bob unloaded us How do how do we produce high octa fuels? with refineries with ethanol blend at some time we do know we have for the very Propatial constraint you know from the EPA regulations so the RVP constraint to be addressed that together is the octa fuel production And of course how much fuel we produce would impact the US refinery industry So Kelly present the eight scenarios is so we base our Kelly's eight scenarios of the potential market penetration of Half as they will soak a year for the US refinery industry to produce that amount of for half what's the impact of the refinery and of course We address the upstream crude the production as an operation as well in our analysis and they do we are your Bob Brian and myself already discussed the vehicle efficiency again so together as you see in the chart We cover from the feedstock production and the fuel production in refineries for petroleum blend stock and Ethanal production of our refineries and they finally have combustion in vehicles and in order to address the petroleum refineries we use the LPA model the linear program model to address this specific area this is the type of models used by petroleum refineries for their optimization so industry use LPA for the refinery optimization or the annual basis to maximize their Profit or reduce their cost. So we use the same model as industry use And of course for LPA modeling You will have a set of input the top of crude you bring in The top of products you produce so in our case We specify the LPA model to produce half gasoline together with many other petroleum products in US refineries and Here are some several results are presented to you and we have a very detailed report with all the detail of the result so on the left side of the slide this is the chart to show you the overall petroleum petroleum refinery efficiency from your limited half penetration to very high half penetration up to above 70% of the gasoline market is half And the different ethanol brand level you tend to produce half OE 25 OE 40 those are the three last you barely see them they'll cover your stack together so the tech home message from that chart is the petroleum refinery efficiency changes Very small to produce half. So we are at his place very small change in the refinery efficiency And the right side is when we do a set of the overall petroleum refinery efficiency Into gasoline efficiency because we have different products that we need to allocate to a different product the overall Efficiency so even when you see the gasoline Efficiency changes changes really small. So that's on the refinery side on the other hand Kali alluded you the Possibility to expand the US gasoline export when you have increased the ethanol brand into the gasoline market So here are the left side is the domestic gasoline production efficiency change So again, you see a very small change in the domestic gasoline production on the other hand on the export the gasoline market and We do I see some somewhat significant change or your significant reduction in the export gasoline efficiency And in our world to wheels analysis, we did include the so-called spillover effect from the domestic gasoline to the export gasoline So this is included in our world to wheels analysis And here is the result on the greenhouse gas emissions for the Gasoline the blood stock. So I guess this is kind of from What you saw in the previous two slides the your small change in petroleum refinery efficiency The in gasoline refinery efficiency, but this is greenhouse gas emissions in grams Promote you of gas in a blending stock. So I guess you see small changes among E 10 half E 25 half and E 45 for both part two at the past three, of course Between the two pads, you see some what's increase in greenhouse gas emissions in part two That's the middle middle midwest refinery district primarily Chicago at the past three is at the Gulf Coast refinery district and The increase in a path two is due to our Significant share of Canadian oil side in the crude input in part two refinery So that's the gasoline a blood stock So now when we produce the final half product meaning the gas in a blood stock as a lot of blood together What is the result for each unit of fuel produced? So again now you see E 10 half E 25 at the E 40 So here the base now the E 10 Regular gasoline that's based now. That's the dot line as you see in the chart and so now you see a reduction for E 25 half at the E 40 half as this reduction is from the lower carbon characteristics of the SNL part So when we have core SNL, we see some reduction when we have second or single SNL as you see on the right side of the chart We have significant reduction So so the other point is on the gas in a blending stock side We see a little change in carbon intensity But when we bring a gas SNL into a gasoline blood stock We see reduction because of the lower carbon characteristics of SNL And now we breathe the efficiency on to the your SNL blood half So your as I mentioned earlier, we have five percent efficiency assumption as our base case And we have 10 percent efficiency as a sensitivity case so when we breathe efficiency in and we see your photo reduction from You know the gas SNL bland effect So now the efficiency breathe for the reduction So this is the per mile result for per mile efficiency now is our factor for the overall Result so you're now I'm going to use animation to reinforce us what you saw in the last start So efficiency itself get ups ourself maybe five percent reduction in a base case Assumption or about nine percent reduction if we you're at his place 10 percent gain in efficiency And if we produce half a just in Refunders itself, we see a little effect on the overall GHG Emissions, but if we bring SNL Into the gasoline blood stock to brought to produce half a we see photo reduction because the SNL Blending effect with lower carbon characteristics Of course the differences between core SNL at the cell you know, so go SNL as you see here So yeah, yeah, this is a say you know, so go SNL at this core SNL So the SNL bleeding effect and the different SNL tabs effect So you're in a conclusion Vehicle efficiency gains and SNL bleeding are the two dominant factors for world to wheels GHG Emission reduction of half a at the impact of half a production on Refundery GHG emissions is relatively small as you saw in those chart So your way you'll see SNL can be a major in Abner in produce half a with Significant vehicle efficiency gain at a large reduction in GHG emissions So that's your our world to wheels results to integrate The other task is together to see your the overall world to wheels GHG result Bob Thank you. So just to very very quickly summarize. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this We've shown that ethanol has very high octane number and and excellent knock resistance properties and can be used to blend a Highly knock resistant high octane fuels that these can be leveraged to design much more efficient engines our Biofuel production supply chain simulations and vehicle adoption simulations suggest that This could lead to 30 billion gallons of ethanol consumption in the 2035 time frame and the well to wheels simulations show for corn ethanol Greenhouse gas emission duck reductions up to 18% and for cellulose derived ethanol up to 31% There are some hurdles to end up introducing these new fuels and vehicles certainly on the infrastructure side there are some issues that have to be dealt with they are very solvable problems, but they need to be dealt with and To introduce a new a new fuel and a new class of vehicles to operate on it requires some sort of Market coordination in terms of investments in the different market sectors to make it happen And so with that I I will Sit down and turn it over to Carol. I believe Thank you all very very much and And I think it was also really helpful to go through the basic summary slides to to sort of pull it all back together again in terms of what all of this research really Helps us understand in terms of the whole role of biofuels and the role of ethanol in terms of providing a high performance fuel that can also provide help ensure good fuel economy and And performance and also at the same time coming from a renewable resource that is going to help a Substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions all of which are very important factors as we think about The way the way forward So let's open it up for your questions and comments, and I should just mention that we are momentarily Expecting congresswoman duck worth to come so go ahead and if you could identify yourself, please Bob Cosack advanced biofuels USA. I first want to thank everybody on the panel really great presentation I'm really glad this information is getting out And I really applaud the work that you guys have been doing on this topic that isn't all that well-known The one comment and I guess question I would like to state is that I think that there is just simply one Barrier to this happening which is the lack of political will to make it happen We know that the eat the the e25 e30 was proposed in tier three two years ago And it was shot down by the administration not only was it shot down But there are factors as part of the cafe standards such as the our factor and the F factor that could have been Corrected properly to encourage the introduction of vehicles and fuels and infrastructure that weren't done I'd also like to point out that we have switched fuels in the past We went from on we went from leaded to non leaded and we and we went to stage two So my question is do you think do you think we could and how could we overcome the political hurdles? Okay Could we hold that question and oh, okay. All right Go ahead. Do you want to go ahead and and answer and then we'll turn to the congresswoman What well you've been in a sense ask us a political and policy question when we're Here to inform you about Technical issues certainly I I think All these things can be done there's no reason why they can't be done, but I Don't think we're going to be addressing the political or policy aspects of your question Okay, and that's something that I think in terms of of How to best deal with as as Bob said there are a lot of things that policy makers need to address and But that we're not dealing with insolvable problems by a long stretch So at this time I am honored to turn to Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth representing the 8th district of Illinois She is in her second term here in the House of Representatives and Has had a very distinguished career. I think everybody is probably familiar with it with her story She is in Iraq veteran. She has served in the veterans administration as an assistant secretary she has And and again is in their second term here where she is making Certainly a mark here in the house with her leadership in house armed services committee the Oversight committee and also on the special Benghazi committee and She has been a force of very very important voice on many different issues here in the house And I think that also as a new mother. She is bringing yet another important perspective That is important for all policymakers to understand and I want to mention also that with regard to all of the things that she has done which has helped her Understand how so many things come together in our and are linked just as what we've been hearing about this morning That she has also spent time really looking at public health issues And that is another aspect with regard to thinking about our transport sector and fuels that is very very important and that we hope to do even more work on and Working with her congressman duck with Glad I stood up Thank you care for organized this great event and for the panelists for coming to the hill today To show your research on this incredibly important topic for our nation The scientists here today including dr. Wang from the Argonne National Laboratory in my home state of Illinois are the real experts But I'd like to take just a minute Before they we go further with the discussion to tell you why this issue is important to me as a layperson You know as a veteran and a member of the House Armed Services Committee I see renewable homegrown fuel as not only critical for our environment and our economy Which you've been hearing about today, but also as a national security imperative While serving in the Iraq war I saw firsthand the painful price our country pays because of our dependence on foreign oil my fellow troops risk life and limb for this precious battlefield resource in fact 50% of all casualties in Iraq were as a result of convoy operations and 80% of all convoy operations was to transport fuel So that is literally thousands of young Americans lives as well as tens of thousands of wounded warriors So I know that biofuels will help America become energy independent But also it's going to make our military stronger and more effective as a result A crucial piece of me being this goal is the renewable fuel standard Which as you know is a really hot debate right now in Congress the RFS is poised to help end our country's dependence on foreign oil Something Congress intended since the laws inception almost a decade ago Production of biofuels at home like the ethanol we make in my home state means less foreign oil imports from unstable countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia Instead of creating jobs in the Middle East or RFS is driving job creation and innovation here at home Supporting over 852,000 green well-paying jobs nationwide jobs that cannot be shipped overseas for me I've been driving an F-150 a flex-fuel vehicle since 2006 and I Understand the discussions that ethanol is not all that as it's currently is it's not all that great of an improvement But frankly it's American grown corn. It's made here in America and I would rather spend my money even if it's a wash on Few that is made here in the United States Keeping American workers in jobs and kept and keeping their Production capacity here in the US then on foreign oil So we're looking at about 852,000 green well-paying jobs nationwide For this reason I have been urging the administration to maintain a strong renewable fuel standard The way encourage continued growth of the American made fuel market And I know that my constituents agree that American investors and consumers at the gas pump are better off supporting American jobs and Access to clean secure American energy rather than Middle Eastern oil Like many of my colleagues. I'm disappointed by the EPA's recent announcements on announcement on the RFS The new rule is an improvement over the last one and I'm glad that it's getting back on track after many delays But I'm still really concerned that proposed requirements are short of the levels Congress intended and short of what American farmers and businesses can produce It's my strong belief that the development of biofuels will protect our environment and strengthen our economy and our nation's security I will continue pushing for strong RFS as the rule is finalized and you should know that this is not something that is Debated just over in the energy and commerce subcommittees, but it's something that is really debated all throughout Congress and armed services now I've gone through three NDAs, which is the the building of the defense budget and so far every time there has been Someone who will introduce a bill that actually would prohibit the United States Navy from developing biofuel capabilities and To me that is just the most ridiculous thing in the world You know the Navy has actually tried and successfully Launch a training a surface warfare training exercise in the Pacific using all biofuels for the ships for the aircraft for the Everything and has demonstrated that it is something that it is capable of doing And I really want to equate this to another precious resource clean drinkable water In the military the Marines have what's called a rope you unit This is a unit that can come in and generate its own water. They have their own osmosis system And so what did they do is I was in Guyana on a humanitarian mission And the Marine unit group you unit came in stuck a hose into us was essentially sewage and Produced drinkable water for the unit on the other end so that we could continue to support the mission of buildings hospitals and schools And that humanitarian mission these units Increase the capacity and the capability of our United States military to be able to fight or or serve in humanitarian missions On the go and be self-sustaining. Why can't we do that with biofuels? Why don't we have that capability? You know I served in Iraq on a base LSA anaconda Logistics support area anaconda that was huge the largest base in in theater And the amount of food scraps and then the amount of waste that was generated on that base Was significant. I would like to see the US military be able to have a Biofuel equivalent of a rope you unit so that our military men and women can have access to those so that we can reduce this the reliance on Petroleum products and also if we're using them to have a much higher standard So that what we have to depend on will go a lot further in terms of mileage standards And and and for me it's all about keeping those troops out of those vehicles in convoys getting killed This is a not just an issue about economic security for this nation incredibly important But it's also about making sure we keep our military strong and capable and and able to Respond and fight whenever the people of the United States ask it to so I when I have this discussion I make a little bit of headway with my colleagues because I don't come from it as your traditional granola eating tree hugger Democrat which I am but but I can have the discussion with my colleagues on a much more tactical level about military security and military Readiness and and that has opened a few minds. So as you're continuing with this discussion today Think about other ways that you can frame the dialogue beyond The one that that is a traditional one and one that we all embrace which is its you know Environmental protection but think about other ways that we can frame this the economic strength one argument is definitely an Important one, but but there are ways to to reach out and find compromise on this and and so my thank you for being here today I want to make sure that you continue to the work that you're doing And I'll keep driving my f-150 until we come up with something better my other I do have actually a plug-in hybrid So where I'm all in on this and let's make sure that We continue to improve and we continue to hold the administration To the goals that we have and not to back off from those goals because every time that we have set the goals Industry has met them and and so to say that the goals are too high Is really to underestimate the capability of the United States manufacturing industry because I believe in American innovation and American know-how And to keep those goals high me only means that we will reach them and then we will have the edge on our competition globally, thank you everyone It's my understanding that the Congress woman's schedule does not permit her to stay for Q&A In which we totally understand, but we thank you so much for being here with us and and for your remarks and Given the question that was you heard directly from a policymaker with regard to Where policy needs to go But I think what's been so important in terms of the message that we've been hearing today is in terms of thinking about all of the Issues around performance of fuels and the efficiency of fuels and what and what ethanol can provide and in terms of higher Blends and also do it very economically other questions Here first Could you just wait for the mic? There you go Bill Brandon In respect to what you were saying about refinery efficiency, I Understood you generally to be saying that that that was somewhat governed by the Read vapor pressure restraints Have you looked at the possibility of try blending with a Butanol that would Give a more positive effect on that refinery end No, we have not looked at the butanol is another renewable Components to play that this was a signal only a signal played into a gasoline component Well, I'll just comment that That we are aware of Butanol's effect on vapor pressure making it go down while ethanol in this blending range makes it go up Which which is a problem for the gasoline blenders. So I I think it's an interesting question in that It might have some some significant benefit Thank you. Good morning. Doug Duranty with the clean fuels development coalition This wasn't my question, but all of our and I do want to ask my question But all of our work is not showing it an increase per se of RVP particularly if you splash blend these alcohols on top of the finished e10 so That's one of the problems we're having is you can't get any more fuel into the market because the RVP restriction is just codified as e10 which is simply because no one ever thought past that so I just I'm sure you guys have seen the same data, but That that's a that's almost a myth that a lot of people on Are operating on that this increases and in fact it goes down, you know with volume But my question to you is you've made a great case and I've seen your work And it's great stuff all of you If we don't get this octane from ethanol what we're just gonna come from you know We've got aromatic caps on toxics and these are toxic substances benzene toluene xylene So if it doesn't come from ethanol what what are the options and secondly don't isn't aren't we even more compelled if we move Into tighter ozone standards and more the country goes into ozone on attainment and has to adopt RFG That definitely caps aromatics So I mean we're really we could be on our unreal Shortage of octane and so doesn't this make it even more compelling what you're what you're doing here Yeah, we did the restrict aromatic contact in our LPE modeling to meet the EPA and California's requirement And without ethanol blending if we're going to make half If we'll go with the tone we your ways the current US Refinery configuration We can only produce maybe up to 20 to 25 percent Half as the share of the gas in your market So if we're going to go beyond that that your ethanol will help Tremendously, that's why yeah, we say ethanol is a great enabler for half significant half production What and some of the other Are you talking about restrictions you're talking about alkylates or iso octane or but or those are those the other I'm trying to remember what some of those other options are but Those are and your we cups your reformate of course will continue to play a critical role for half Production and other component some undesirable gasoline component for the US gasoline requirement Basically, we said you are those kind of gets into the export market. That's why you see the domestic gasoline versus Export the gasoline so some gets into there With this card on price, so we did assume Assume a discard the price for expo the gasoline because some Undesirable components add up in that market And we took that into our cards in our world world with analysis So we have all the details in our LPM modeling results Which component is increased increase the which component is the decrease that they all cut you are in our detailed report And I think it's also true that the petroleum refiners are very highly optimized Right now and they don't really want to make more aromatics. So ethanol is is in a lot of ways The the best choice or maybe the only choice It costs them something to make more more aromatics So Aromatics are more expensive to produce. We also know that if the ozone standards are tightened That's an issue because that's all connected again to aromatics and that basically we've been dealing with the situation where the octane in fuels has been provided by a petroleum derivative in terms of the combination of of chemicals in terms of of aromatics or You can get your aromatic or you can get your octane from from ethanol so that basically it's a renewable Octane provider in terms of ethanol or Aromatics to provide the octane coming from oil products So in all of these things that you were hearing are totally related in terms of thinking about what happens if if ozone Is tightened as well? And it was very interesting in terms of knowing that The cost goes up for refineries to produce ever more aromatics Okay, another question. Hi. I'm Kevin Adler from oil price information service And I think I'm directing these questions. Mr. Johnson, but Certainly welcome anybody's answer the first is I have to and the first is just a simple thing that the 30 billion Gallons that you that you referenced in the slides is that in addition to this was roughly 13 14 Billion gallons of ethanol use now. So is it incremental 30 or is it a total of 30? That's incremental Well, it's so it's the 30 billion gallons are all going into half And then half does cut down the amount of E10 and therefore the amount of ethanol going into E10 You know, so it's so it's incremental and then subtracts Some out of quite a bit out of E10 Okay, okay. Thanks, and the second question and it goes back again to octane of is my understanding is that a lot of the Blending of E10 now is into a gasoline with a lower lower than 87 octane that that refiners are not using the octane benefits to To raise octane above 87 so in talking with them Are they even interested in that or do they sort of look at it as this this way to take this cheap low octane? blend stock and and and get to the minimums Well, they're there the refiner's business is all about They're just meeting the minimum spec and making you know a half a penny a gallon on a ocean load ocean of product So yes during the the last ten years They've all Reoptimized their systems and they make what we call a sub octane blend stock for oxygenate blending or sub octane Bob That has about 84 Pump octane and when you put the 10% ethanol in it it meets the 87 octane They don't have any incentive to do otherwise regulatory or or financial And I don't see them doing anything differently unless you know, there's a market demand for more premium gas or Or for high octane fuel Or or some other some other reason why they would do two things differently Hi, I'm Karen Pollard with representative Denny heck When we have to answer mail And we get mail on all sorts of things, but What mostly I heard was concerned on for If the standards were raised That the small engines of folks that had small engines would That would ruin their engines. I think it was mostly motorcycles and snowmobiles Can you speak to that? I you know Well, I don't think that necessarily is a high octane fuels issue The the small engines today should be compatible with 10% ethanol because it's The only fuel available so hopefully they're the manufacturers of those engines have kept up with the times and made their their engines available You know, I don't know if motorcycle manufacturers would like to design motorcycles to use this high octane fuel But as long as there are Vehicles and engines around and significant number that could not use, you know an e25 or e40 blend then We'd have to find a mechanism to ensure that a compatible fuel was available Because that you know, they're not going to be an E10 compatible Car or motorcycle or lawnmower or whatever is not going to be compatible with the 25 or e40 that's one of the hurdles that we looked into and it's important to keep in mind that That in order for a fuel to be considered convenient essentially the cost of convenience is nothing It only has to be offered in about 20% of the current refueling stations, you know, and so So e10 or e0 will probably be around for quite a while And then there's an increasing number of blender pumps also that could Keep it available and then I was talking to the National Association of Convenience Stores, you know getting getting their perspective on it and in in they be One idea that came from them was that, you know, Home Depot could offer e0 and Marino's could offer e0 That's you know big home improvement stores like that kind of have the clout and the Sophistication to be able to offer a fuel, you know, so they saw that as one possibility Going well into the future like if e0 did disappear from the other the other stations Just to comment Not everybody in here is old enough to remember when when diesel started to get popular in the 70s but there were diesel vehicles being sold in the United States and It was a hard fuel to find and today less than five percent of the light-duty vehicles are diesel Diesel fuels everywhere. So we have we have a fuel everywhere for a tiny piece of the fleet and what we're talking about here I think is hopefully a growing Size of the fleet and as Cali said if we can start with about 20% of the stations it would it would Could grow from there, but as Bob said we need to maintain the legacy fuel for the legacy vehicles That's a really really good point because I wanted to ask kind of a follow-up question on that too and that During I think it was Cali during your presentation you commented about in terms of looking at sort of small businesses with That didn't know what they had in there You know essentially in terms of looking at their their tanks and the cost of of their having Updating infrastructure or anything like that or maybe Bob you you raised this and so I was curious though in terms of the percentage of Installations that are really those kinds of situations as opposed to the much larger like say convenience stores chains or Whether it's your target of Walmart's or you know other Other facilities that offer a lot of pumps a lot of fuels all over the country So what are we looking at in terms of percentages? Or quantities So I had a pie chart on my slide about oh, maybe we can get it up for you Slide. Oh, good idea. Good idea There you go. So 58% 59% are the single owner stores there seems to be a trend that I'm reading about in this industry now towards consolidation and large not just you know Costco and and Walmart, but other large You know more than than you know 24-pump type Type of refueling businesses that own multiple stores, maybe even hundreds of stores So maybe that'll change over the next decade, but today the situation is Lots of small businesses, but if we're talking 20% Availability potentially that could all initially be in the larger stores that have more options more capital to play with Probably a lot more profitable. Okay. They're the better records. Yes. Yeah. Good point. There's a number of the most sophisticated convenience store chains That I mean so putting in a new tank is much much cheaper if you do it when you're putting in the new station Sure, the incremental cost is pretty low There's there's a number of new of convenience store chains that are putting in extra tanks As they build stations just just to be prepared for whatever they mean may need it for in the future Okay, great. Thank you Okay, last question in the back there. Okay a Follow-up question to this discussion. Did you do any calculations on the relative cost of? Converting the station to eat each 25 or e30 Compared to how much it costs to convert a pump to stage 2 vapor recovery No, we don't I don't have that information off the top of my head. It's a very interesting question Any other last questions? Okay, go ahead Seems like to me you could have to do a bill Brandon again to a layman That would seem like you could have two tanks one would be your Bob tank and the other one your ethanol tank And then have a blender pump to give you any blend that you want. Is there Regulatory issues of who is certifying the fuel when you do that are they are they at this point are the Tank farms certifying the fuel or what I think it would need to be any a finished gasoline e10 tank and an ethanol tank I'm not sure that the the re the retailers can actually be the blender of the finished gasoline And I think that's actually happening in some places there is some concern with I Don't know how real it is with handling Denatured fuel ethanol not blended in gasoline because it the vapor pressure above it can be in the The flammable range under certain conditions and so that has to be handled appropriately There's some concern that not all retailers really know what they're doing with that But I but I believe in some states the state regulators and this is more from a safety perspective are allowing basically what you describe with e10 and Denatured fuel ethanol to be blended at Blender pumps. Did you want to add anything Brian? I? Don't know the numbers, but there are there's on the order of 3,000 stations that offer e85 Some number of those are blender pumps, and they already offer You know easier oh e10 e15 e30 maybe even e50 right Dave So that's a as Callie said sometime That's a that's a wreath fair retailer trying to distinguish themselves from their competition, but so When I you know we did the the wide-open throttle study with the flex fuel vehicles You know instead of the FFB owner pulling up and getting e10 wouldn't be great If we could get them all to clamor for e30 and or e25 and and and ask for that so Yeah, but I don't know the how many are blenders do you? We'll try to find that Christie Moriarty would probably know but she's not here But we're happy to find that and make that information available to talk to Christie and get that information because I think it's important in terms of looking at all these issues that it sounds to me like there are a lot of benefits moving forward and that that there are not insurmountable challenges by any stretch of the imagination and then in terms of at least going to an E25 blend is should not be that difficult a situation in terms of looking at costs and existing infrastructure So that there are certainly opportunities and that it's also important I think in terms of thinking about how people get information and How many people are really aware of what is available where and that? Probably retailers need to do a better job of that as as well as You know looking at at automakers etc in terms of just getting more information out to the public about what's available Dave Great well then hopefully people are going to be asking them to do that. Okay, great I want to thank all of our speakers I think that they probably are all very willing to take other questions and provide information Going forward or if you want to give us the questions We're happy to to get those to them And I want to thank you all very very much for your time and all of your research and for coming and talking to Talking to us today. So we really really appreciate it. Thank you all and But before before you all go, I just wanted to mention that Coming up a DOE is holding a major bioenergy conference at the convention center on the 22nd and the 23rd and 24th of this month and on the 22nd I believe that it is transportation day and it is available. So I hope you got the flyers outside So I just wanted to make sure that you're aware of that and hopefully you will take advantage of it. Thank you