Sugaring your fuel could be good: Glendale inventor makes fuel from peroxide and sugar, but no one's buying.

Sugaring your fuel could be good

Don't talk to Nedelko "Nick" Delchev about Middle East oil.

Like millions of commuters, he vividly remembers how the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s sent the price of gasoline through the roof and pushed the world into recession.

"I was very angry with gas lines," snorts the Bulgarian-born machinist. "Even in America, someone from another country could put the screws to me."

Armed with little more than a seventh-grade education, a library card and a few tools, Delchev set out to get even. And in 1987, after a decade of work and $14,000 in personal costs, he won a U.S. patent for a novel fuel that makes solar power look as conventional as Kuwaiti crude.

Big business hasn't paid him much attention, though. His plans for a "sugar-fuel" have been rebuffed by Chrysler, Ford, General Electric and the U.S. Department of Energy. Even the South Coast Air Quality Management District has turned him aside.

For the moment, as the outgoing Delchev concedes, he is in the same category as other underfunded but eccentric inventors who surface during oil crises - entrepreneurs who claim they've discovered fuels that run on chicken manure or garbage. Still, as poor as Delchev claims he is, he had enough money to hire a public relations agent a month before the Iraqi invasion.

"I haven't got together with the right people," the 49-year-old inventor says casually, rubbing a hand over his handle-bar moustache in the hot Glendale sun. "I just want someone else to produce the fuel and give me a little bit of the royalties."

But it didn't take Delchev's travails or Saddam Hussein's imperialistic moves to underscore America's energy dilemma. Since oil prices fell in the mid-1980s, the United States addiction to foreign oil has grown to a whopping 50 percent of all oil consumed here.

At the same time, efforts to develop non-petroleum fuels for the nation's 178 million cars have produced little results. The biggest strides, energy experts says, is development of cleaner-burning gasoline like Atlantic Richfield's EC-1 or more fuel-efficient cars.

"Since the beginning of the Reagan administration, the budget for alternative fuels has been cut back dramatically to about $25 million," says staff scientist Veronic Kun of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We've stood still."

Even proponents of alternative fuels admit the problems are thorny.

Methanol and ethanol fuels produce dramatically less air pollution, but require, in some cases, 50 percent bigger fuel tanks or more frequent refueling. Meanwhile, vehicles running on compressed natural gas, like those being produced by General Motors, get very poor gas mileage despite being almost pollution-free. And the 21st Century cars fueled by solar-generated electric power only have a range of about 100 miles, take a long time to recharge and cannot exceed 65 mph.

"We have gone forward with alternative fuels, but they have not proven to be economical," says Paul Holtberg, principal economist with the Gas Institute in Washington, D.C.

Even less polluting, gasoline-powered cars have only partially succeeded. The Big Three U.S. automakers now produce vehicles that spew 96 percent less hydrocarbons and 76 percent less nitrogen oxide than their ancestors. The problem is that there are 51 million additional cars on American roads since 1970.

Nowhere is the environmental problem of automobile pollution more evident - or more acute - than Southern California, America's smog capital. Levels of smog-producing hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide still exceed federal health standards - despite some of the strictest tailpipe standards in the United States.

The Southland problem is so bad that one version of the new Clean Air Act requires 150,000 local buses, trucks and cabs be "ultraclean" by 1994, meaning they use more oxygen-rich fuel like methanol or ethanol. (Oxygen helps gasoline burn more cleanly.) The state has even ordered 10,000 electric vehicles by 1995 and the California Air Resources Board is close to adopting tougher emission laws than Congress.

The impact on local business from automobile-produced smog in undeniable. The AQMD has hammered local industry - from aerospace facilities, to printing plants, dry cleaners to furniture manufacturers - with Draconian regulations needed to bring the area up to federal health standards by 2007. Estimates of the cost to businesses range from $2.6 billion to $9 billion.

If cars, trucks and buses - which produce two-thirds of the gunk that dirties the air - ran fractions cleaner, smog regulators would no longer be public enemy No. 1 among business leaders.

"We've told the federal government that if we had better controls on cars, especially ones from out of state, we wouldn't have to go as far with local business," says AQMD spokesman Bill Kelly.

The politics of clean air don't register with 49-year-old Delchev, who escaped from Bulgaria into Greece 30 years ago during a change of communist border guards. "There was no stopping me. I couldn't live with their rules anymore," he recalled.

After arriving in the United States, Delchev toiled in New York as an auto mechanic, but moved to California for better pay and warmer winters. Eventually he landed a job with Kaiser Aerospace in Glendale. In 1969, he saved enough money to open his own shop.

Soon after the 1973 oil shock, Delchev realized what Uncle Sam, the Big Three automakers end environmentalists have only recently understood: a new fuel is needed for American cars that is economical, derived from man-made ingredients, and is pollution free.

"I went to libraries and studied books on engineering and physics," he says with his characteristic grin.

But Delchev, supporting himself as owner of a one-man machine shop called No Problem Co., didn't know how to make the fuel. Dinner in 1980 with a fellow Bulgarian, a chemist by trade, bore fruit. His friend advised him to use hydrogen peroxide like the Nazis did with their V-2 rockets.

Using a small, cluttered room in the back of a Glendale radiator shop as his laboratory, Delchev did just that. It worked, or so he says. What he came up with hits close to home. The fuel's ingredients have been in the American household - in the hair and stomach of its occupants - for years. It is made of 90 percent watered-down hydrogen peroxide and 10 percent sugar.

Delchev now says he wants to develop a turbine-powered car that runs on his patented sugar fuel, though he says an airbreathing piston-driven car can be adapted. Ask him where the prototype car is and he says there is none because of time and money constraints. Ask him if it can be done and he replies, "No problem."

He has built a prototype engine, or contraption, which cost him $4,000, numerous trips to the junk yard and every moment of his free time. Once running, it took 10 minutes to warm up, spewed steam into the air and seemed to drive the turbine. It also created a deafening drone that Delchev says can be reduced.

According to the transplanted Bulgarian, the turbine works like this: the sugar fuel is injected into a converter where it reacts with a small amount of manganese dioxide. That causes the hydrogen peroxide to expand and break down into oxygen, water and heat. A rod-like device called a glo-plug raises the temperature in the converter and creates combustion. The result is a super-heated, oxygen-rich steam-gas that is funneled into the turbine, driving it at temperatures between 850 degrees and 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

In general, he says, the fuel is 25 percent more powerful than gasoline because less oxygen is wasted in the combustion process. It's also less polluting. The byproducts of the fuel are 86 percent steam and 14 percent carbon dioxide, compared to gasoline, which spews comparatively high levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons - the stuff of urban smog.

"The system is very clean burning," says the U.S. patent examiner in his summary of Delchev's patent.

It is also cheap, with an estimated cost of 50 cents a gallon.

If the fuel sounds too good to be true, it is, according to Dr. Sidney Benson, scientist emeritus at USC's Loker Hydrocarbon Institute.

Hydrogen peroxide is costly, decomposes in a short time and in some cases is explosive, Benson said. It addition, it is only produced by a few sources like DuPont. And sugar, like oil, is largely imported.

"From my general knowledge I'm very skeptical about the sugar fuel," Benson says. "All the major petrochemical companies have already looked carefully at every alternative to gasoline. Nobody has come up with anything."

Even Caltech professor George Gavalas, who Delchev says is a sugar-fuel believer, would only say it is a "nice, but unproven device."

Nevertheless, Delchev says he has triumphed just by making his fuel drive the turbine. It was proof that futuristic alternatives for gasoline don't have to originate in the corporate boardroom or government lab and that tin-pot dictators can be prevented from petroleum blackmail.

"When it worked it was like a huge rock got off my back," Delchev sighs. "It's not easy making people believe in your dream."

PHOTO : Getting even with OPEC: Nedelko Delchev runs an engine on his alternative fuel

PHOTO : Delchev: `I just want someone else to produce the fuel and give me a little bit of the royalties'

PHOTO : Turning sugar, hydrogen peroxide to fuel: `It's not easy making people believe in your dream'