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It's the first time in the history of the United States natural gas prices separated
from gasoline. This was an opportunity to get natural gas vehicles into our infrastructure
and seriously displace foreign oil in a big way. The problem is, you know, when was the
last time you saw a natural gas refueling station? So, the idea behind the MOVE program
was basically to lower the cost of refueling by enabling home refueling - so, low cost,
at-home compressors. And the second part of it was dropping the cost of the tank. So,
REL is a great project - two brothers up in Upper Peninsula Michigan. What they do, no
one else in the world can do. When someone says "that's impossible," we say "well, when
would you like it done." The purpose of the ARPA-E project working with REL is to provide
a conformable fuel tank. Conventionally, when we store gas at high pressure, we use cylindrical
geometry - that's nature's shame for storing high-pressure gases. We take and put our cylindrical
tanks in the trunk. Well, *** soon as you do that, you can't put your groceries in.
With a conformable design, with the box, we can pack fuel more efficiently inside of the
vehicle. So I need to fill up somewhere, which brings up the second part of the natural gas
problem, the infrastructure to fuel up while you're on the road. Sixty million homes have
natural gas. So, in a sense, we have an infrastructure for natural gas but we can't tap into it,
and that's where Oregon State came up with the concept of simply taking an engine, and
taking one of the cylinders and turning it into a compressor. You would pull up at your
home or your place of business where you have a natural gas supply line and you would connect
it to that compressor cylinder on the engine. So essentially, the compressor capability
is on board the vehicle not outside. What's innovative about this technology here is that
we're able to leverage the modern internal combustion engine technologies available to
us today and incorporate the compression combustion technologies into one engine. Not only are
they a catalyst, they also provide the critical funding in order to advance these types of
energy technologies and make them available to everybody. And so, ARPA-E has the capability
to step in and play that important, critical seed funding role. ARPA-E understands that
innovation comes from small business. They have a higher level view of the overall problem,
but they also have the technical savvy to look at all the projects and understand the
viability of the technology involved as well as how all of the teams will integrate together.
If we can diversify our portfolio of energy sources for the transportation sector, this
would be a big win. Not to mention that natural gas is much cleaner-burning fuel. This is
one-hundred-percent to the country's benefit.