What’s next for e-fuels?

We will not. Widespread electrification is still at least 10 years away in Europe, so nearer 20 years in Africa, Asia and South America. Yet in the meantime we are all still going to want to get around, and the vehicles the majority of us will do so in will, like it or not, continue to burn fuel.

It’s estimated that even by 2035 there will still be over half a billion ICE vehicles on our roads. Thus, the whole point of e-fuel is to plug that gap, and plug it fast, because we can no longer afford to bury our heads in the sand on this one. To dismiss e-fuel as an indulgent irrelevance that’s been designed to cater for no one but the dear old car enthusiast is, let’s be clear about this, complete garbage. The idea that in just seven years’ time (or by 2035 in Europe) everything will be okay because, by then, the EV infrastructure will have been built (by whom, and with whose money?) and that our transport systems will be carbon-neutral by then is entirely delusional. The rhetoric of the doomed.

Fortunately, however, the EU’s lawmakers have realised this recently – having been put under serious pressure to do so by German and Italian transport ministers – and have granted e-fuelled vehicles an exemption from the ban on ICE vehicles that comes into force in 2035. In short, you will still be able to sell, buy and drive brand new internal combustion-engined vehicles in the EU beyond 2035 – but only if they’re run on e-fuel.

Thus, by approving the widespread use of e-fuel beyond 2035, the EU is now betting the farm on the scaling up of its manufacture, hoping its cost will subsequently plummet. At which point more of it will get used, you’d assume, and we won’t end up pumping anywhere near as much CO2 into the atmosphere during the 15-20 years it takes for global electrification to genuinely occur.

Or to put it another way, e-fuel would now appear to be the best (maybe the only) hope we’ve got of not completely mucking it all up during the next two decades, so why not go for it hook, line and sinker?

Unless you’re UK transport minister Mark Harper – who like all the great delusionists seems to believe he has a magic hat out of which miracles can randomly be plucked – that’s essentially what the rest of the world is now thinking. And doing. And once again Porsche would appear to be well ahead of the eight ball, hence my recent road trip along the Not Quite The End of The World Road in Chile, and to the Highly Innovative Fuels plant specifically to see where and how they actually make the stuff.

The Haru Oni plant itself is tiny, but right now it’s just a template for what’s possible; a toe in the water to prove what can be done if/when the process is scaled up globally (and more quickly than by anyone else making synthetic fuels, Porsche and HIF claim). The process involves harnessing the wind that blows so hard down there via a giant Siemens turbine. This then provides direct power for an electrolyser that separates the hydrogen from oxygen in water (H2O). The harnessed hydrogen is then mixed with CO2 captured from the atmosphere to create e-methanol.

At the moment the CO2 used at the plant is captured from a beer factory in Argentina (I kid you not), but eventually it will be extracted from the atmosphere by carbon capture, a complex and expensive process that will become far simpler and less costly once scaled up, claim the engineers.

The final part of the process involves an extraordinary chunk of technology that was originally developed by Exxon-Mobil in New Zealand in the 1980s to capture flare gas. Known as MTG – methanol to gasoline – it’s provided lock-stock by Exxon-Mobil at the plant, and converts the e-methanol that’s produced into e-fuel. Even the HIF engineers go glassy-eyed when asked how the unfathomable network of pipes and dials we’re shown actually works. Either way, at the other end of the MTG process, raw 93 octane e-fuel materialises, to which additives can be mixed to bring the octane rating up to whatever is desired. The e-fuel produced can then power anything from a Model T to a classic 911 to, well, a Porsche Panamera Turbo S.

It can also be used as a ‘drop in’ between tanks of regular unleaded if necessary, or at least until it becomes more widely available. And because the process to make it removes almost as much CO2 from the atmosphere as whatever vehicle it fuels then puts back in, e-fuel is ‘virtually carbon-neutral’ claims Porsche. In fact, in cars that produce less than around 100g/km of CO2 it’s closer to being carbon-negative, they reckon, which is why – assuming its manufacture can be scaled up rapidly, bringing its cost down to a more realistic level than the notional £50/gallon of today – e-fuel is surely good news for all of us, not just us die-hard enthusiasts.

You’d think so, especially now the EU has given it the big thumbs up, meaning the industrial-sized plants HIF/Porsche already have planned in Chile, Texas and Tasmania can be fast-tracked to produce the stuff on a massively more global scale, and quickly. Think millions of gallons a month, not just 130,000 litres a year.

And in case you’re still wondering, Mr Harper, e-fuels can be distributed via the exact same network of pumps and (potentially e-fuelled trucks and planes) that’s currently used to distribute unleaded. And our cars will drive exactly the same on e-fuel as they do on the nasty old stuff they burn today.

Don’t believe me? Once my tour of the plant was complete, and my brain had been suitably fried by the science, Porsche handed me the keys to a Panamera Turbo S and said ‘see you at the hotel, it’s about 180 miles and it’s that-a-way’ pointing directly along the road that may or may not be renamed, having filled the car with 50 litres or around $500 of e-fuel. So off I went.

The scenery was surreal, the road endlessly long and straight. I drove for hours across some of the bleakest, most untouched landscapes you could ever wish to see. And every time I stopped to take some snaps, or just to get out and drink it all in, the door of the Panamera would be flung open violently on the wind. Because it’s there all the time, it never ceases. It’s the reason why Porsche and HIF and Exxon-Mobil and all the other investors in e-fuel have come here in the first place – to harness the power of a wind that never drops.

And unless they’re all fibbing on truly a grand scale, it works. The Panamera drove identically on the e-fuel it was filled with on day one at the plant to the way it did on the conventional unleaded it was topped up with on day two. There was zero difference. Same fuel consumption, same emissions, same feel to the throttle, same car.

Except on day one it ran on a fuel whose manufacture had removed most of the CO2 that its twin-turbo V8 subsequently blew back into the atmosphere. And on day two it was a one-way street. Big difference.

One that Europe’s lawmakers have now finally woken up to and altered their policies to suit accordingly. So it would be good – or maybe just a bit less idiotic – if ours did the same and gave e-fuel a chance. And if they don’t, there’s always the guillotine, although it may be too late for that by then.

E-fuels in the UK, by Andrew English

In the beginning of the post-Brexit world, the UK Government was adamant that it would adopt EU standards and targets for exhaust emissions for 2025 and 2030. Since then it’s all got a bit fuzzy and in some cases the UK has gone further, such as the ban on new non-hybrid petrol and diesel car sales by 2030, five years before the proposed EU deadline.

In response to The Intercooler’s direct question last month about the future for new e-fuel cars, the Department for Transport (DfT) spokesperson said: ‘We remain committed to phasing out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, with all new cars and vans being zero emission at the tailpipe by 2035.’

You might notice this response doesn’t really address the issue at all, which is exactly the experience of the House of Commons Transport Committee of 16 MPs, which took evidence from, amongst others, Porsche, the UK Petroleum Industries Association and Zero Petroleum, which has already produced synthetic aviation fuel for use in RAF trials.

In spite of the secretary of state for transport claiming to the Committee that the DfT ‘is not wedded to particular technologies’, when the Transport Committee asked the DfT last December about ‘whether synthetic fuels and other emerging technologies were being considered alongside EVs for private cars’, it received a similarly vague reply.

The second permanent secretary told the Committee: ‘It is fair to say that, on cars, it does feel like the momentum is with electric… Vans, similarly, look to be moving towards electric.’ And Caroline Low, the DfT’s Director for Energy, Technology, and Innovation told the enquiry: ‘We have seen no evidence that e-fuels can deliver the air quality benefits that come from a battery-electric or hydrogen fuel-cell car. That is the real challenge. They deal with the carbon, but they do not deal with the NOx and other emissions.’

Again, missing the point, which perhaps explains the Committee’s slightly disgruntled response to Low that ‘the calculation may well be different for the “legacy fleet” of private cars’ and its overall conclusions on e-fuels that, ‘given the existing private cars that will remain on the road for some time, drop-in replacement fuels from renewable sources could be a no-risk, very sensible and economically sound approach.’

But even if everyone bar the DfT thinks e-fuels could be a sensible solution to some transport needs, there is clearly an issue with whether they would be allowed to be used in new cars sold in the UK after 2030 (or 2035 in the case of plug-in hybrids). Those local pollutants and particulates, as well as cost, are clearly issues, but there’s also the business of ensuring that new combustion-engined cars are actually filling up with e-fuels and not just pouring in a tank of fossil-fuel derived petrol, which the rest of us will be using for some time after the proposed ban on new combustion cars. If e-fuels turn out to be significantly more expensive per litre, there’s an obvious incentive to do so. One rather antediluvian solution to the problem of identification is the red dye which was used to mark agricultural tax-exempt diesel fuel, which would stain fuel filters and tanks thus marking the vehicle with the mark of Cain. 

Another might be to sample exhaust emissions with some sort of live infra-red Fourier transform spectroscopy, or gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which would provide data to be uploaded over the air to the cloud. Forthcoming Euro 7 standards require real-time emissions reporting from cars anyway, but the technology of on-board gas analysis like this and its cost, robustness and longevity are largely unknown.

Either way, the UK Government appears not to be interested in spite of some of its own MPs being sceptical about its electric-car-or-nothing approach. As an illustration, identify which of the following statements comes from where:

‘The case for full electrification in private cars is “the received wisdom”, and therefore needs further scrutiny and investigation.’

‘Mass electrification is a major part of the solution, it isn’t a “silver bullet”. The enemy is fossil-based energy, not a particular technology’.

The first came from the House of Commons Transport Committee, the second from Luca de Meo, Renault boss and head of the ACEA organisation of European car makers. Not so very far apart, are they?