ARE SYNTHETIC FUELS THE FUTURE FOR MOTORING?

Imagine if running your old were CO neutral Well now Porsche is working on it Take green wind electricity Use it to drive a complex series of industrial processes First to electrolyse water into hydrogen which is easy Then to separate CO from the air which is harder and still in early development Combine the hydrogen and CO into methanol and thence finally into e fuel aka green petrol Drive the car with the e fuel and the CO emitted balances the CO that went into the fuel Huzzah!

E fuel is not a new idea but it’s unusual for a carmaker to invest directly Porsche is partnering to build a plant with wind turbine manufacturer Siemens and oil company needing a new line of business Exxon The end plan is half a million litres a year by

Trouble is the above process is not at all energy e cient as Michael Steiner Porsche’s head of R&D readily admits when we ask So e fuel made with kWh would drive a petrol car about a fifth as far as a battery car on the same electricity

Why do it? Because the wind is available where there are few cars this plant is in a remote part of southern Chile where the wind reliably blows it’s not far from

Cape Horn And long distance bulk electricity transmission is pretty much impossible The Chilean hydrogen could be transported to drive fuel cell cars here but again moving hydrogen is di cult

So this process deploys wind and solar energy we wouldn’t otherwise use And critically it instantly makes carbon neutral the petrol cars we already have via a distribution system petrol stations we already have

At first Porsche’s e fuel will go to motorsport and its Experience Centres with public sale later Initially it’s expensive double digit pounds per litre without tax But Steiner says after a while if it isn’t taxed like petrol it should be competitive That depends on the future of carbon taxes and emissions credits Certainly e fuel is better for the world than biofuels that use up what would otherwise be food land

The future is hard to read but the consensus is the car world’s power sources will become more diverse “The main change will be the transition to e mobility ” says Steiner ie e fuel won’t replace EVs in Porsche’s plans E fuel is just another strand letting some petrol cars live on sustainably