Green burn

As this issue goes to press, the German automotive sector has announced an agreement with the EU to allow the sale of new vehicles running on ‘e-fuel’ to continue beyond the 2030 cut-off for petrol and dieselengined cars.

This concession was won on behalf of manufacturers such as Porsche, who wish to continue production of iconic performance cars such as the 911 that are built around a distinctive internal-combustion engine, but has interesting implications for the wold of road transport E-fuels themselves are made by using electricity (wind, solar or some other renewable) to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen in a long-established process known as electrolysis.

pollutant chemicals that must be removed from it (with varying degrees of success) before it is fit to be used as fuel in road vehicles.

It’s an intrinsically dirty, energy-hungry and sometimes dangerous process: typically a refinery uses the equivalent of 16 days of its own energy production to power itself for a year.

In contrast, Porsche is involved with an e-fuel plant at the extreme south of Chile, where a single Siemens wind turbine takes advantage of the constant gale blowing across the Magellan Strait to create 130,000 litres of e-fuel a year at a cost of $10 a litre. That is just a drop in the proverbial (Southern) ocean, of course, but it’s a start none-the-less.

a comparable effort from Government and other organisations to invest in or even enable expanded power distribution and charging facilities, and alternatives are now being sought.

E-fuels are among these alternatives, but are faced with two further problems. One is the diversion of R&D away from combustion and into battery-electrics which is at very least slowing the take-up of new combustion fuels, and the other is the introduction of the fuels themselves into the existing distribution network.

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Air capture technology, a new industrial process, is then used to combine the hydrogen with atmospheric CO2 to create methanol. The methanol then goes through a final process to turn it into gasoline. Combustion of this fuel merely recreates CO2 that was in the atmosphere anyway, rather than releasing carbon that was trapped in the carcases of dead micro-organisms in the Mesozoic era over a span of about 190 million years.

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The amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere during production is very nearly equal to that emitted to the atmosphere when the fuel is combusted. But that’s by no means the only, or even the largest, benefit.

Real environmental gains come from its production compared to refining product from crude. Crude oil quality and composition varies widely, and there is a large quantity of

Wind the clock back a year or so, and this would have been seen as of no relevance by the British Government, which saw battery-electric as the only acceptable form of motive power for vehicles and wanted the internal combustion engine consigned to history.

But that situation seems to be changing. The UK Parliament’s Transport Select Committee has urged the Government to do everything it can to speed up the mass production and use of e-fuels in the automotive and aviation sectors, plus investigate its use in road transport and shipping.

One problem is that vehicle manufacturers, including truck OEMs, have diverted an increasing amount of R&D spending away from internal combustion and into battery-electrics. As you can read in this issue, they are now increasingly alarmed that their efforts down this route have not been supported by anything like

Cummins is one engine manufacturer which is developing ‘fuel-agnostic’ engines: these share a common core, but with different top-end components that can be manufactured to run on methane, hydrogen, petrol (including e-fuel) and diesel (including HVO). It’s entirely possible that an increasing number of European truck makers will make increasing use of Cummins proprietary engines to at least fill the gap until the infrastructure is ready for battery-electrics or other non-combustion propulsion.

Road transport already has an alternative to e-fuel in place, of course: HVO. This is a carbon-neutral (or even carbon-negative) fuel, that is acceptable for most modern truck engines and can be used without modification. Unlike bio-diesel, is causes no combustion, contamination, or maintenance issues.

Yet the Government ignores its potential, seemingly as a matter of policy. It pays the same fuel-duty as ‘fossil’ diesel, and no attempt is made to promote it.

We can only wonder why.

Matthew Eisenegger, Publisher