ghly $1.1 trillion for the entire system.
The research makes up an important part of a white paper recently produced by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the nation's largest chemical engineering association. In the paper, the chemical engineers call for a greater integration of energy sources and urge policymakers to consider chemical conversion processes as a potential method to produce cleaner and cheaper fuels.
"Right now we are going down so many energy paths," said June Wispelwey, the institute's director and a 1981 Princeton alumna. "There are ways for the system to be more integrated and much more efficient."
The paper was written by Vern Weekman, one of Floudas' co-researchers. Weekman, a lecturer at Princeton, is the former director of the Mobil Central Research Laboratories and a past president of AIChE.
Weekman said the main reason the industry has not embraced synthetic fuels has been cost. Although he said the economics are "still on the edge," Weekman noted that rising prices for crude oil and improvements in the efficiency of synthetic fuel production have made the process far more viable than before.
"The main reason we wrote the paper was to get the planning agencies the national academies, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Department thinking about this," Weekman said. He added that it was important that the agencies consider "this key link of using chemical processes to produce conventional fuels."
In the Princeton research, Floudas' team found that synthetic fuel plants could produce gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels at competitive prices, depending on the price of crude oil and the type of feedstock used to create the synthetic fuel. About two-thirds of crude oil consumed by the United States is used for transportation fuel, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA said the United States import
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| Contact: John Sullivan js29@princeton.edu 609-258-4597 Princeton University, Engineering School Source:Eurekalert |
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