Technical Paper
Modeling the Impact of Reducing Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions with High Compression Engines and High Octane Low Carbon Fuels
2017-03-28
2017-01-0906
The Environmental Protection Agency, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and California Air Resources Board released the joint mid-term Technical Assessment Review of the light-duty GHG standards in July of 2016. The review generally asserted that the GHG standards adopted in calendar year 2012 for 2022-2025 model year vehicles were feasible. Although many different technologies were evaluated, the review did not assess the benefits of high compression ratio engines enabled by a high-octane low carbon fuel. This study fills in the gap in the Technical Assessment Review by examining the impacts of a 98-research octane number gasoline-ethanol blend with 25 percent ethanol. We find that this fuel would enable higher compression ratios to improve tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions by about 6 percent on most engines.
