CAN THIS TYPE OF FUEL SAVE OUR PLANET?
Porsche has Holy Grail of synthetic gas, writes David Booth, but at what cost?
Could Porsche have found the Holy Grail of gasoline — the Hail Mary of hydrocarbons, if you will? In a process that sounds more complicated than it really is, Porsche says it has found a way to use windmills to electrolyze water in oxygen and hydrogen, scrub carbon dioxide from the air, combine the two into methanol and then, in one final emissions-free coup de grace, reformulate the whole shooting match into gasoline.
And not some rare form of toluene or some other Formula One-like carcinogen that will turn your future kids into mutant ninja turtles. Nope, just plain ol' ordinary gas that can power any internal combustion engine, can be blended with ordinary pump gas, and in the ultimate of technological ironies, can also be blended with ethanol. Best of all, because every carbon molecule of the 92 octane that flows out of this MTG (methanol-to-gas) reaction was previously filtered from the air, it's carbon neutral. It's even low in benzene and almost completely devoid of sulphur.
It all sounds a little fantastical, doesn't it? Plucking carbon dioxide from the air. Windmills. Electrolyzing water into hydrogen. Turning methanol into, not mere gasoline additive, but gasoline itself. But despite sounding like a plot from Star Trek, it's all been done before, albeit not with the efficiency nor the total dedication to emissions reduction that Porsche, along with partners Siemens and Exxonmobil, has brought to the table.
Capturing carbon dioxide from air is nothing new. From the crude “scrubbers” that attempt to filter CO2 out of combustion in industrial plants to the ingenious battery-like device MIT recently announced that could work even in the roughly 400 parts per million currently found in the atmosphere, the technology exists, albeit not yet on a scale large enough to make a significant impact. Ditto the electrolytic separation of water — H2O — into oxygen and hydrogen; we all did that in our high school chemistry labs.
Methanol-to-gas reduction is ages old as well, Exxonmobil patented the process in 1975 — by mistake, by the way — and built its first working plant in 1979. In fact, by the mid-1980s, incentivized by a second debilitating oil crisis, New Zealand produced fully one third of all its gasoline from an Exxonmobil methanol-to-gas facility that was only shut down in 1996, when the threat of oil shortages had become a distant memory.
The difference is how Porsche,
Siemens, and Exxon have brought all these processes together. Previous MTG plants used steam-reformed natural gas as their source for methanol because it was cheap. But it wasn't carbon neutral. Producing it from scrubbed CO2 and electrolyzed hydrogen is, but both those processes are extremely energy intensive. Which is why Porsche's new “Haru Oni” pilot project is in the Magallanes region of southern Chile. Michael Steiner, member of Porsche's executive board in charge of research and development, says it was chosen because it boasts the highest average wind speeds in the world, the better to drive the windmills needed to produce all that emissions-free electricity.
Not surprisingly, this synthetic gasoline remains more expensive than the traditional fossil fuel. And it will be difficult to expand to the economies of scale that make production of gas from crude oil so very cost effective.
Eventually, Porsche's target price for e-fuel will be the same one to two euros (CND$1.50 to $3) per litre that Europeans currently pay at the pumps, says Steiner.
That is, however, without taxes. And therein, to quote the bard, lies the rub. How synthetic fuel is treated by various jurisdictions will dictate whether carbon-neutral gasoline remains a boutique industry or becomes a serious weapon in efforts to reduce tailpipe emissions.
In any case, Porsche's process is a lifeline to the classic car owners of the future. With progressives pushing aggressively for the demise of internal combustion, is a ban on the sale of gas far behind?