PORSCHE RESEARCHES SYNTHETIC FUELS
Just when you thought it was electric or bust...
“With electricity alone, you can't move forward fast enough.” So says Michael Steiner, head of R&D at Porsche. Given Porsche’s huge push toward an electric future, including spending billions upon billions euros, that is a somewhat surprising statement.
What Steiner is hinting at is Porsche’s newfound interest in synthetic fuels. “This technology is particularly important because the combustion engine will continue to dominate the automotive world for many years to come,” says Steiner.
"If you want to operate the existing fleet in a sustainable manner, efuels are a fundamental component. We have a team that is looking for suitable partners who want to build pilot plants with us and prove that the entire process chain works and can be industrialised," he explains.
The problem, it seems, is the disappointing pace of batteryelectric adoption. "Electric mobility is an exciting and convincing technology but, taken on its own, it is taking us towards our sustainability targets at a slower pace than we would like," Steiner reveals.
The idea behind synthetic fuel is simple enough. If you use sustainable energy, say solar, to scrub carbon from the atmosphere and combine it with equally sustainably sourced hydrogen, you can make a combustion fuel that is entirely carbon neutral. It only puts into the atmosphere the carbon that was scrubbed from it to create the fuel.
The really clever bit is that it turns any existing combustion car into a carbon neutral car. However, Porsche is not the first manufacturer to moot synthetic fuels and there is little sign that the technology is gaining significant traction. Thus far, the high cost of producing synthetic fuel has made the notion seem uneconomic.