Affordable mobility and climate neutrality!

The EU has reached an agreement with Germany on the internal combustion engine dispute! After 2035, new vehicles with such engines will still be allowed on the market, on condition that they use climate-neutral fuel!

Pending this, concrete procedural steps have been agreed and should be in place by next autumn! Unfortunately, the CO2 standard regulation for cars was not only examined from an environmental point of view, the fact that Germany’s car industry would suffer incalculable damage if it were to be banned was a major influencing factor in the vote!

A fuel is carbon neutral if it is produced using renewable energy and carbon dioxide captured from the air.

However, some experts believe that the use of synthetic fuels is only necessary where no other solution is possible (aviation), while electric transport would be more appropriate for cars!

The truth must lie somewhere in the middle. A divisive decision has been made “lazy compromise”!  There is no point in a blanket ban, but the future of the European car industry, even if it protects 600,000 workers, may have more important factors.

There would be far fewer problems, fewer people using their cars, if people were served by modern, fast, affordable public transport in smaller towns and cities! For example, while it is cheaper for 2 people to travel from Tatabánya to Budapest by car than by train, it is difficult to reduce our footprint by awareness alone, unfortunately!

“From the atmosphere into the tank of your car

We hear more and more about synthetic fuels made from carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide captured from the atmosphere, or hydrogen produced from renewable energy, but there is a long way to go before they can really take off. There is only one commercial e-fuel production site, HIF Global’s Chilean plant, which has been operating since 2021, and will be joined by Norwegian company Norsk e-Fuel from 2024, but the latter will focus on aircraft fuel.

The best-known method of producing climate-neutral e-gasoline and e-gas oil is the so-called Fischer-Tropsch process, developed in Germany in 1920. It was used during the Second World War to keep military vehicles running when conventional petroleum derivatives were not available, and since 2006 it has also been used to produce Shell V Power Diesel fuel, but the latter is not climate neutral because it is produced from natural gas.

Ideally, therefore, the combustion products produced by e-fuel engines do not cause additional environmental pollution because the fuel is not produced from petroleum in the first place, but by using gases extracted from the atmosphere. It all depends, of course, on where the electricity for the whole process, or even for the production of the added hydrogen, is sourced from.

E-fuels can be produced from coal or biomass, depending on the feedstock, and have the undoubted advantage that energy can be stored in this form much more easily and for much longer than as electricity or hydrogen. Those who argue in favour of e-fuel also often point out that the infrastructure needed to produce and transport conventional fuels can be used to deploy the technology. This is no small advantage in an era of still relatively few charging points and limited range electric cars.

According to Dr Máté Zöldy, head of the Innovative Vehicle Technologies Research Group at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), the green hydrogen needed to produce e-fuels can be combined with many feedstocks and research is underway into further processing of waste-based products with hydrogen. The search for the best fuel molecule is also ongoing, as several hydrocarbons may be suitable in addition to conventional ethanol, methanol and iso-octane.

BME is also involved in this research, with the aim of producing a propellant or propellant component that produces minimal pollution throughout its lifecycle and can be used in current cars, says Zöldy. If such an environmentally sustainable component could be blended into 10 percent of existing fuels, overall fleet emissions could be reduced by 10 percent.

According to Dr Máté Zöldy, the introduction of e-fuels is hampered by the fact that industrial-scale production has not yet been solved and production costs are relatively high, so a litre of e-fuel now costs around €6-7 (2400-2800 forints), but the expert believes that by 2050 the price of e-fuels could fall to around €1-3 per litre, comparable to the price of currently available petrol and diesel.

Opponents of the technology argue that the production of e-fuel is a highly energy-intensive process. It takes five times as much electricity to produce enough electricity to cover a given length of road as it would to charge the battery of an electric car to cover the same distance. According to a recent study by the German environmental organisation Transport & Environment, German motorists could pay fifty percent more at the pumps in 2030 if they use e-fuel instead of conventional fuel. According to T&E, the push for e-fuels is in the interests of the oil lobby alone, and Germany would be even more in need of green hydrogen, 72% of which it currently sources from elsewhere, such as the Middle East. Europe, on the other hand, has a chance of becoming a world player in lithium production and by 2030 half of the amount needed for electric car batteries could be mined locally, says the organisation.

The experts interviewed agree that a mix of propulsion modes would be optimal, but if we want truly sustainable mobility, the way forward is not to change powertrains or fuels, but to rely on vehicles only when really necessary, at the cost of partial sacrifice of convenience.”

Source:Dániel Zách Telex 2023.03.25.

Photo.

MTI/EPA/Clemens Bilan