A truck that runs on booze and B20 diesel could be the ticket for beating high fossil petroleum prices – provided you don’t live next door to the Trailer Park Boys.
A 100-litre stainless steel tank containing 95 percent ethanol might be enticing for the fictitious fuel-stealing gang from the Canadian television series, but the siphoning experience might not be what they bargained for.
That’s because a denaturing agent, usually gasoline, is added to keep people from drinking it.
“You’d get yourself pretty sick if you tried it,” said Lorne Grieger, an agricultural research and development manager for the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute, who brought one of only two such units in Canada to the Westman Agricultural Diversification Organization crop tour in Melita, Man., July 22.
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The vehicle has been converted to run on wet ethanol, a substance basically the same as vodka but much stronger than the 40 percent alcohol typically sold in liquor stores.
Burning wet instead of dry ethanol, which at 99.9 percent alcohol requires a more complicated production process to extract that last five percent water content, offers big savings through eliminating the most energy intensive steps in distillation.
Modified by the Saskatchewan Research Council, the engine is a stock 6.6-litre Duramax diesel in a 2006 Chevrolet Silverado 2500HD, but with about $15,000 worth of conversion components. The compression ratio is unchanged at 16.8:1, offering a maximum of 360 horsepower at 3,200 r.p.m. and 650 pound feet at 1,600 r.p.m.
A computerized control unit measures the amount of ethanol injected into the intake manifold, creating a dynamic fuelling strategy based on engine speed and load.
At idle, it burns 75 percent ethanol. At full power, the ethanol injection ratio is reduced to zero and the engine runs on the B20 biodiesel blend. If no biodiesel is available, it will run on regular diesel.
“It’s a seamless operation,” Grieger said. “The big thing is reducing your emissions.”
The advantages of the conversion system are reduced emissions, with nitrogen oxide cut by up to 35 percent and particulate matter down by as much as 60 percent compared to standard diesel.
At idle, the tailpipe emissions smell a bit like Grandma’s jam pot boiling on the stove.
Conversion kits might become commercially available in the future as the technology becomes more widely adopted, Grieger said.
Mass production would likely drive costs lower.
