Your Tax $$$ At Work: Argonne Lab's Better Batteries, Greener Fuels

By John Voelcker

John Voelcker

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Vehicle being crushed, from Argonne National Laboratory video

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If you watch TV or read the papers, you'll see lots of coverage of people who are pretty unhappy with one facet or another of the U.S. government. This post is about something government seems to do relatively well: pre-commercial research and development.

Here at GreenCarReports.com, we usually cover specific green cars, most of them now on sale or coming within a year or two. Once in a while, though, we look at some of the broader research on green cars and renewable energy.

The Argonne National Laboratory--one of a network of 17 national labs funded by the Department of Energy--has a slew of programs aimed at making renewable energy practical, and enabling carmakers to build better, cheaper electric cars. We picked four to focus on.

Ohio State University EcoCAR Challenge team, first-place winners in 2009 (first of three years)

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From Challenge X to Eco-Car

We'd already met Argonne through their participation in the Challenge X competition among colleges to build greener cars. That four-year program, from 2004 to 2008, saw 17 teams compete to make the most energy efficient adaptation of a stock 2005 Chevrolet Equinox crossover.

The latest iteration of the competition, which started last year, is known as the Eco-Car Challenge. This time, 17 college teams from the U.S. and Canada are competing, and the starting vehicle is a 2009 Saturn Vue Two-Mode Hybrid.

Ohio State University triumphed in the first-year competition, winning First Place Overall for their design. Their extended-range electric vehicle uses a 1.8-liter engine, fueled by E85 ethanol, as a range extender.

Better batteries for electric cars

Looking further into the future, one vitally important area of research is better lithium-ion cells. They'll be used in the battery packs that will power tomorrow's electric cars, which will recharge from the electric grid rather than filling up with gasoline.

In June, the chemical company BASF signed a world-wide licensing agreement to mass-produce and market composite cathode materials, invented and developed at Argonne, to manufacturers of advanced lithium-ion cells. BASF expects its facility in Elyria, Ohio, to be the largest cathode plant in North America.

Argonne's cathode material is expected to increase power and energy density in lithium-ion cells, make them last longer, and reduce safety risks as compared to today's cathodes.

Roadside buffers might provide biofuel crops. Photo by George Joch, courtesy Argonne National Lab.

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Biofuels from wasteland?

Returning to liquid fuels, Argonne environmental scientists Cristina Negri and Gayathri Gopalakrishnan studied the potential of using contaminated or undesirable land like highway medians and soggy ditches for growing hardy, inedible plants that could be turned into biofuels.

Simple on the surface, their concept addresses two problems at once. It alleviates the concern that plants grown for use in biofuels displace food production, an issue that got much air time when corn-based ethanol fuel was luring big investment dollars. (That boom is over now.)

Their process also removes contaminants from soil, and soaks up nutrient-rich irrigation runoff that could cause algae blooms in lakes and rivers. The nutrients and contaminants can more easily be contained and then removed from the residue of biofuel production than they can be captured in or on the ground. In essence, the plants mop up the bad stuff and hand it over while providing fuel.