Most every motor vehicle manufacturer is pushing the development of electric vehicles to one degree or another, some even committing to an all electric lineup in the not too distant future, all in the name of climate change. Whatever you may think of that issue, when so many companies are going electric and current political forces are anti-fossil fuel, you might want to have a Plan B in place if you want to keep your internal combustion engines on the road, whether you’re building vehicles, racing them or simply own one.
Porsche, so well known for high performance gasoline powered cars, is concerned enough about the issue that they’ve signed on as the primary customer for a new plant being built to produce synthetic fuel. After all, a Porsche without fuel is just a garage ornament.
Formula 1, the exotic, high dollar racing series, has a different issue. Teams funded by auto manufacturers have to justify their expense and those manufacturers want something in return in the form of new technology that can trickle down, helping them build low emission, carbon neutral vehicles, so the racers are developing sustainability in their drive systems beyond simply adding electric power and regenerative braking, because they need to maintain the experience for the fans and the scream of the engines is a huge factor. Liquid fuel is a necessity, so they’re on the hunt for a 100 percent sustainable fuel.
This plays out in much the same way across the rest of the motor vehicle marketplace, if you want to keep your ICE powered vehicles, they need fuel. We already have fuel, of course, gasoline is a wonderful, energy dense liquid, but it’s currently facing political headwinds, so what are the alternatives?
How are e-fuels produced?
In the case of Porsche, the project they are a part of is creating e-fuels through a process powered by carbon free electricity:
First, Electrolyzers use wind power to split water into its components, oxygen and hydrogen. …
Next, COâ‚‚ is captured from the air and combined with the green hydrogen to produce synthetic methanol: The basis for climate-neutral fuels like e-diesel, e-gasoline or e-kerosene, that can be used to power cars, trucks, ships or aircraft.
Formula 1 is in a period of transition, first trying bio-fuels:
… the governing body delivered the first barrels of 100 per cent sustainable fuel, blended from bio-waste, ethanol produced from second-generation (inedible) plants and wood-based toluene (to increase octane rating), to F1’s engine suppliers for evaluation.
‘That fuel didn’t perform as well as we might have hoped,’ (Pat Symonds, F1s chief technical officer) readily concedes. ‘When I say that, we weren’t expecting the same performance from it because the Formula 1 fuels we have at the moment have been tailored for energy density, above 43MJ (megajoules) per kg. They’re incredibly energy dense fuels. So I think there’s still some work to do.’
Then they considered custom laboratory designed fuels created specifically for particular engines, but they’re probably moving toward “drop-in” fuels, developed by Aramco and multiple other oil companies, using solar power to create e-fuels that would work in a wide variety of current engines.
F1 has some of the most complex drivetrain requirements anywhere, the e-fuels are just one part, but if they come up with a good solution, it may have far reaching implications for internal combustion engines everywhere.
Are e-Fuels the future of liquid fuel?
From a positive perspective, e-gasoline can be used in current engines without changes, distributed through the current fueling infrastructure, and they exhibit significant emission reduction, as well.
Is this practical?
The Haru Oni project backed by Porsche looks like it should work in a technical sense, but producing this fuel at the scale necessary to replace the gasoline and diesel fuel currently derived from oil seems to be a very tall order. The pilot project in Chile may supply some of the needs of Porsche and with promises of scale in the coming years, it may meet more of their needs, but making a dent in the current needs of the entire world’s current vehicle fleet seems difficult, if not impossible, because they’re going to need an enormous number of these kinds of plants and a huge amount of electricity to power them.
There’s also no mention of the cost of producing fuel by this process. How much are you willing to pay to fill your tank with a carbon neutral fuel?
Politics
If carbon free electricity is necessary to power the process, wind, solar and hydro will not be anywhere near enough to do the job and there is a glaring omission among the carbon free power sources listed and it betrays the politics.
If the goal is de-carbonizing our electric grid or producing e-fuels, to not mention nuclear power is environmental and political posturing. Nuclear power is carbon free and has a capacity factor of over 95 percent, while wind and solar are intermittent, operating at a capacity factor averaging 25 or 30 percent, except, perhaps, in this one windy location in Chile where the Porsche project is located. Unfortunately for Porsche, Germany has decided nuclear power is forbidden, which currently makes Germany’s electricity very expensive and plants such as the one planned for Chile can’t be built close to home which adds the cost of shipping the fuel in by tanker to what is likely an already very expensive fuel.
The fuel planned for Formula 1, if developed with plants run by solar power in Saudi Arabia, may work for the racing series where cost is less of an issue, but again, if we’re going to scale this process to replace fossil fuel in the billion vehicles currently on the road, there’s some work to do at an extremely high cost.
Nuclear power could deliver carbon free e-fuels
If the process of developing e-fuels in these types of plants is technically feasible, using nuclear power would mean we could make current internal combustion engine powered vehicles carbon free which would not require a wholesale replacement of the current vehicle fleet. We could eliminate the range and recharge time issues because liquid fuels could be delivered in the existing infrastructure and your current gasoline vehicle would now be carbon free. What’s not to like?
Will this happen?
More and more environmentalists are coming around to nuclear power, as well they should, because if the goal is as much carbon free power as we need, then we have the technology to deliver it. If climate change is a crisis and carbon free is the answer, what are we waiting for? Of course, if solving the problem isn’t the goal, then nuclear power will not be used for the grid or e-fuels or anything else. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this develops. Or, we could all do this.
Haru Oni e-fuels plant
Racecar Engineering May 2021
Also, thanks to David, a reader from Brazil for a link used in this story.
Rod Newstrom says
Excellent article! In addition the Porsche’s effort, you might look at ARPA-E’s work with fuel from phytoplankton (the planets largest carbon sink) and Shell’s Gas to Liquid (GTL) which is already scaled up. Ammonia looks promising as a fuel as well. Long haul aviation may turn out to be a driving force if governments ever start pushing the industry on emissions. They can’t realistically go electric now and it’s not clear it’s ever going to be an option.
Rod Newstrom says
On the aviation front: https://flip.it/ex0lBW
Jiro Yamamoto says
Wind and photovoltaic electricity is the cheapest new energy and power that can be purchased for delivery in the next few years by a power company today. The reason nuclear power plants aren’t being built and are being closed is that their product is much more expensive than gas and renewable electricity,
Liquid fuels can be synthesized but they will be more expensive than electric energy. Any form of synthetic liquid fuel that uses large amounts of electricity will be 2-4 times the cost of the electricity. For any vehicle where cost and convenience is dominant, such as the car in the garage, battery electrics will be the predominant form of mobile energy storage. The cost of liquid fuels for heritage vehicles is very likely to rise as the rest of society switches to using battery electricity.
Aviation will almost certainly mostly use liquid fuels for the next 30 years. The fuel costs of those flights will be more expensive than petroleum based fuels.
The current level of carbon dioxide is 410 parts per million. That is the highest level of carbon dioxide in the air in 800,000 years. If you don’t believe in human induced climate change how did that carbon get into the air? Have you noticed the weather recently? How big were those hailstones? How fast are the glaciers retreating?
I love the sound of a two stroke thru expansion chambers. I enjoy the complexity of all those pistons going back and forth in the Deltic and the sleeve valves in the Sabre and Hercules. Kreidler achieved awesome speeds with 50cc. The burble of a cross plane V8 is lovely. The future is going to be different. Embrace it.
Jiro Yamamoto says
Forgot to mention how interesting the wood gasification technology is. Just across the bay All Power Labs is on the forefront of biomass gasification technology. They started with a dragster engine at Burning Man.
http://www.allpowerlabs.com
Paul Crowe says
— “Wind and photovoltaic electricity is the cheapest new energy”–
They’re also heavily subsidized by the government to make them cheap, … if you don’t count the subsidies, and when you need them most, there’s no switch to turn them on.
Capacity factor of a nuke plant is over 95 percent, wind turbines come in around 25 percent. Nuclear can satisfy base load requirements, wind and sun can’t.
Nuclear power is one of only two power sources where the fuel can be stored on site for long term operation, coal is the other one. Wind and sun depend on, well, the wind and sun. No wind, no electricity. All night and cloudy days, no electricity.
Yes, natural gas is cheaper than nuclear, but current political forces are working hard to make it more expensive by restricting or eliminating fracking.
The actual footprint of a nuclear plant for a given amount of power is a very tiny fraction of a comparable wind farm or solar array, in other words, you don’t have to destroy thousands of acres of the natural environment in order to protect the natural environment. The new small modular nuclear plants take up far less space.
Nuclear plants, once built, run for many, many decades while wind turbines and solar panels need to be replaced sometimes as soon as after 15 or 20 years of intermittent operation and then you have a toxic waste disposal problem for these “green” technologies.
Nuclear for the win.
–“For any vehicle where cost and convenience is dominant, such as the car in the garage, battery electrics will be the predominant form of mobile energy storage.”–
Yet, even in California, electric car owners are switching back to gasoline.
—” … the highest level of carbon dioxide in the air in 800,000 years”–
Who measured the CO2 800,000 years ago?
—“How fast are the glaciers retreating?”–
I live on the Great Lakes. How were they formed? Oh yes, when the glaciers retreated due to global warming, which must have been from all of the humans driving SUVs at the time. Those darn humans.
—“how interesting the wood gasification technology is”–
Low carbon?
Even if you really, really believe that wind and sun are the answer, it still won’t make it come true.
Jason says
The argument against e-fuel is efficiency and cost. Given a unit of electricity is is much more efficient to use it directly to charge an electric vehicle that then uses 90% of that energy than to covert it to liquid fuel and then burn it in engine at 35% – 40% efficiency.
I invite you to read the source study for the article you linked: Electric Car Owners Switching Back to Gasoline. Some highlights:
1. 83% of BEV owners bought another EV. The headline flips the reality in the data.
2. 65% of those that switched back to gas said they where likely to purchase another EV in the future
3. 71% of those that switched back to gas had no charging at home or only 110V Level 1
4. The study is old. Most of the BEVs in the study were 1st generation compliance cars with ranges less than 100 miles.
I leased a 2016 Chevy Spark EV for 3 years. It was a great car that worked great for my 50 mile commute despite the 82 mile range. It was eye opening to experience the convenience of driving an EV and the improved driving experience. However, when the lease was up the EV went back to Chevy. We had 3 cars: Spark EV, Sportwagen TDI, and an Astro Campervan.
At the time my wife’s job was 7 miles away and she was commuting by bike 4 days a week and driving 1 day. I was driving 50 miles. There was no math where it made sense to keep the Spark or replace it so my wife didn’t have to drive the van 14 miles a week. Then COVID hit and we both worked from home for a year. She changed jobs and now has a 45 mile commute. I drive to the office a couple times a week but the company I work for is recalling us to the office in June. I’ll likely ride a motorcycle for the summer but come fall I will be looking for a replacement car. It will likely be a Chevy Bolt with a 259 mile range.
So long story short – I would be one of those 17% of BEV owners that switched back to gas but it wasn’t because I didn’t like the EV.