On July 11, the Sino US Exchange Meeting on Clean Transportation Fuels and Air Pollution Prevention was held in Beijing. At the meeting, relevant experts from the US biofuel industry and Chinese environmental protection experts shared their experiences on topics such as air pollution prevention and control, and the US ethanol gasoline promotion experience.
Chai Fahe, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Environmental Sciences, said that in recent years, many places in China have been continuously exposed to haze pollution. Regionally, Beijing Tianjin Hebei region is still the region with the most serious air pollution.
Liu Yongchun, associate researcher of the Ecological Environment Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that in the process of analyzing the causes of air pollution in China, it was found that the indicators of individual pollutants were relatively easy to reach the standard, but the indicators of particulate matter were difficult to control. The comprehensive causes were complex, and the particles formed by the secondary transformation of various pollutants played a major role in the formation of haze.
At present, motor vehicle emissions have become an important source of regional air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, PM (particulate matter, soot) and other harmful gases. The emission of pollutants is closely related to fuel quality.
In the 1950s, the “photochemical smog” events in Los Angeles and other places in the United States directly led to the promulgation of the United States Federal Clean Air Act. At the same time, the United States proposed to promote ethanol gasoline. The Clean Air Act became the first act to promote ethanol gasoline in the United States, providing a legal basis for the development of biofuel ethanol. In 1979, the United States established the “Ethanol Development Plan” of the federal government, and began to promote the use of mixed fuels containing 10% ethanol.
Biofuel ethanol is an excellent non-toxic octane number improver and oxygenator added to gasoline. Compared with ordinary gasoline, E10 ethanol gasoline (gasoline containing 10% biofuel ethanol) can reduce PM2.5 by more than 40% overall. The environmental monitoring conducted by the national environmental protection department in the regions where ethanol gasoline is promoted shows that ethanol gasoline can significantly reduce the emission of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, particulates and other harmful substances in automobile exhaust.
The research report “The Impact of Ethanol Gasoline on Air Quality” released at the Fifth National Ethanol Annual Conference also showed that ethanol can reduce the primary PM2.5 in automobile exhaust. Adding 10% fuel ethanol to ordinary gasoline of ordinary automobiles can reduce the particulate matter emissions by 36%, while for high emission automobiles, it can reduce the particulate matter emissions by 64.6%. The organic compounds in secondary PM2.5 are directly related to the aromatics content in gasoline. The use of ethanol to replace some aromatics in gasoline can reduce the emissions of secondary PM2.5.
In addition, ethanol gasoline can also reduce toxic pollution emissions such as deposits in the combustion chamber of automobile engines and benzene, and improve the efficiency of automobile exhaust catalytic converters.
For biofuel ethanol, the outside world also worried that its large-scale use might have an impact on food prices. However, James Miller, former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy and Chairman of the Agricultural and Biofuel Policy Advisory Company, who attended the meeting, said that the World Bank had also written a paper a few years ago. They said that food prices were actually affected by oil prices, not by biofuels. Therefore, the use of bioethanol will not significantly affect the price of food commodities.
At present, the ethanol gasoline used in China is composed of 90% ordinary gasoline and 10% fuel ethanol. China has been promoting fuel ethanol for more than ten years since 2002. During this period, China has approved seven ethanol enterprises to produce fuel ethanol, and conducted pilot closed operation promotion in 11 regions, including Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Anhui and Shandong. As of 2016, China has produced about 21.7 million tons of fuel ethanol and 25.51 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
The number of motor vehicles in Beijing Tianjin Hebei and its surrounding areas is about 60 million, but the Beijing Tianjin Hebei region has not been included in the fuel ethanol pilot.
Wu Ye, vice president of the School of Environment of Tsinghua University, said that objectively speaking, the use of ethanol gasoline with a reasonable formula did not lead to a significant increase in fuel consumption and energy consumption; For different gasoline formulations, the pollutant emissions are different, increasing and decreasing. The promotion of rational ethanol gasoline in Beijing Tianjin Hebei region has a positive improvement effect on reducing PM2.5. Ethanol gasoline can still meet the national 6 standard for high efficiency control vehicle models.
Post time: Oct-26-2022