Every major car company is struggling to build electric vehicles fast enough.
They’re really fast and fun to drive, require almost zero maintenance, and are way cheaper
to charge than gasoline.
But there’s another benefit, the entire process is reversible.
Use energy from the battery to drive your car, then turn around plug it in and recharge
the pack.
That just wasn’t true for gasoline, but what if there was a new breakthrough that
could change all that, and let you keep driving your gas car in a renewable way?
We’re talking about efuels, I’m Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
We know that electrifying and decarbonizing our way of life are the most effective ways
for ordinary people like you and me to fight climate change.
But, even though EVs are becoming more popular every minute, not everyone can afford them,
and others simply love their classic cars too much to give them up.
But what if I told you that there’s a technology that has the potential to decouple the internal
combustion engine from climate change, making transportation green even without going electric?
I’m Ricky, and this is Two Bit da Vinci.
The Current State of the Internal Combustion Engine
The internal combustion engine or ICE is regarded as the main culprit behind the climate change
crisis.
This is why it’s on most countries’ agendas to phase out ICE-powered vehicles by 2050
or sooner.
[source] As you know, I’m a big advocate for EVs
and I believe they’re the future of mobility.
But, you have to admit that, for all the bad they’ve done to the environment, or, rather,
that we’ve done by using them, internal combustion engines have also been key to humanity’s
progress.
Without them, cars probably wouldn’t exist in the first place.
The Wright brothers wouldn’t have invented powered flight in 1903 [source], and the international
shipping industry would look a lot different without cargo ships crossing the Atlantic.
The main reason why the ICE has been so successful throughout its almost 150 years of existence
is that it allowed us to harness one of the most energy-dense, easily extractable, and
easily storable sources of energy: fossil fuels.
But this created a big problem for the environment.
By taking fossil fuels from the ground and burning them in our engines, we released too
much carbon into the atmosphere, upsetting the delicate balance that controls the Earth’s
climate.
Now, we’re faced with having to clean up our mess.
Thankfully, today we have EVs, so, we just ditch the old gas-hungry cars, trucks, and
SUVs and replace them with those, right?
Sadly, things aren’t that simple.
The Problem with Phasing Out the Internal Combustion Engine
Phasing out the internal combustion engine is more challenging than it seems:
First, we may not be able to electrify everything that currently runs on ICEs.
EVs are a no-brainer for the personal passenger vehicle, but unless we make a gigantic breakthrough
in battery energy density, things like commercial aviation, air transportation, jet fighters,
and the heavy shipping industry may never be fully electrified.
The batteries we’d need to provide the necessary range would simply be too heavy.
[Ad Break] Second, according to some estimates [source],
there are about 2 billion internal combustion engines in operation today, most of which
are in cars, but also in motorcycles, airplanes, helicopters, and ships.
Replacing those implies making an equal number of battery packs to power electric motors,
putting a huge strain on the industry’s supply chain that could take years to overcome.
Furthermore, once we replace them, we have to do something about the old cars.
The logical solution is to recycle them, of course.
But only about 80% of a car’s weight is recyclable and the other 20% goes to waste.
So we’re still looking at an amount of waste equivalent to the weight of approximately
400 million cars worldwide [source].
With the average weight of a car at around 4,000 lbs, that works out to 1.6x10^12 Lbs
or 800 million US tons.
That’s the equivalent of almost 140 Great Pyramids of Giza.
It’ll be a challenge, to say the least.
But, what if it didn’t have to be?
What if there was another way around the problem and, instead of looking for ways to replace
the internal combustion engine, we found a way to save it, and with it, all the massive
infrastructure already in place to make, service and refuel our conventional cars, motorcycles,
planes, and ships?
That’s precisely what several companies are attempting to do.
How?
By turning our carbon emissions back into fuel—enter e-fuels!
What are e-fuels?
E-fuels, also called synthetic fuels, are basically any form of carbon-neutral fuel
produced from carbon dioxide or monoxide and water with the aid of electricity.
It’s a very simple idea that works sort of like running a combustion reaction in reverse.
In other words, the process takes the products of combustion, which are carbon dioxide and
water, and combines them to form the original reactants, which are fuel and oxygen.
Now, logically, since burning fuels releases energy, putting them back together requires
introducing energy, and for the whole thing to make sense, we need to ensure that that
energy is clean.
This is similar to how hydrogen is only as clean as the energy used to produce it.
So, why is this so important for the average Joe?
Why should we even care?
Well, there are several reasons: first, unlike burning fossil fuels, which takes new carbon
from the ground and adds it into the atmosphere, burning e-fuels releases carbon into the atmosphere
that was already in the atmosphere, to begin with, making it a carbon-neutral fuel.
Second, regardless of how they’re made, e-fuels have a nearly identical chemical composition
to the fuels we refine from crude oil.
What that means is that we can use them on the same engines that run on fossil fuels
without modification.
This last bit is what sets e-fuels apart from all other technologies!
E-fuels are the only alternative in the world that can literally replace fossil fuels, as
in “take their place” wherever fossil fuels can be used.
So, unlike other energy storage solutions like batteries that require electrical motors
or hydrogen that requires fuel cells or specially modified combustion engines, we can use e-fuels
on any car, motorcycle, airplane, or ship that already uses conventional fuel.
This means that we could replace fossil fuels without replacing our cars or the world’s
current transportation infrastructure.
We can carry on using our vintage Harleys, our huge diesel pickup trucks, and even carry
on launching rockets into space and beyond, all of it without an ounce of guilt.
Heck, the world could even do without EVs!
Well, not really, bit I’ll get back to that in a minute.
How are e-fuels made?
So how does this actually work?
The key process for making fossil fuels was invented back in 1925 and is called the Fischer-Tropsch
process.
This is a sequence of reactions that take carbon dioxide or monoxide and combine it
with hydrogen to produce methanol (itself a fuel).
The methanol is then transformed through further chemical reactions into liquid hydrocarbons
like the ones found in gasoline.
There are also other newer processes that are based on the same principle, but that
use different feedstocks and milder conditions.
Who is making e-fuels?
But if this process has been around for 100 years, you may be wondering how far along
this technology is today, and why it’s only getting any now.
Furthermore, who is making e-fuels?
Well, there are several key players in the e-fuel industry at the moment.
Porsche, Siemens Energy, and ExxonMobile through HIF
The first one is a Chilean startup called Highly Innovative Fuels or HIF which received
an investment of $75 million from Porsche as well as more from Siemens Energy and ExxonMobile
to build their Haru Oni pilot plant in southern Chile, where there are some of the best conditions
for wind power in the world.
[source] The plant will use wind power to generate
green hydrogen and then combine it with CO_2 from the air following the Fischer-Tropsch
process to produce e-fuels like e-gasoline and e-jet fuel, AKA sustainable aviation fuel.
The pilot plant will produce about 34 million gallons of e-fuel in 2022 and is set to reach
130 million gallons per year by 2026 [source].
This may seem much, but it’s really not.
The US alone consumes almost 3 times the 2026 target annual production in a single day [source]!
But that’s not the real issue.
The bigger problem is that the pilot plant will produce e-fuels at a cost of about $23
per gallon at first, and they hope to bring that down to about $7.6 per gallon when they
enter full-scale operations.
Considering that today diesel costs $5 per gallon (and that’s high because of the war
in Ukraine), you can see that e-fuels have a big disadvantage in terms of costs.
Air Company Air Company is another startup launched in
2019 that are currently developing a catalog of products derived from the CO2 in the air,
including e-jet fuel, perfumes, and even a perfectly drinkable vodka (e-vodka, I guess?)
Prometheus Fuels’ Fuel Forge Although backed by huge names like Porsche
and Siemens, HIF can’t compete with what another company called Prometheus Fuels is
doing in California.
This unicorn startup promises to solve one of e-fuels’ biggest problems, which is cost.
The company was founded by Rob McGinnis, a Yale graduate that also made important contributions
to water desalination throughout his career.
Prometheus Fuels’ process is different from what the guys from Porsche, HIF and Air Company
are doing.
Their technology, which works in modular shipping-container units called Fuel Forges, captures CO2 from
the air by dissolving it into water, and then electrolyzing the solution directly to reduce
that CO2 into alcohols in a process they call reverse combustion instead of using the Fischer-Tropsch
process.
They can do this without separating the CO2 from the water and without using an external
source of hydrogen, saving a ton of energy in the process.
Then, they transform these alcohols into hydrocarbons to make whatever particular fuel they want.
But, to do this, they have to separate the water from the alcohol first.
This is normally done through distillation, which is a very energy-intensive process.
Instead, McGinnes and his team created a special membrane that is made up of an impermeable
polymeric matrix traversed by carbon nanotubes that only let the alcohols through.
You can imagine the membrane as a sheet of water-proof spandex with a bunch of straws
poking out on either side, only millions of times smaller.
By reducing the energy consumption in both processes, Prometheus is able to bring costs
down dramatically, to a point where their fuels are actually cost-competitive with traditional
fossil fuels, even at the pilot-plant scale.
That said, Prometheus is still not in the full production stage, but it will be soon,
thanks to the $1.5 Billion dollars they raised in its Series B funding round last year, so
we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for them.
Everything seems pretty solid, and the company’s CEO even claims they already have a contract
with American Airlines to buy the first batch of 10 million gallons of e-jet fuel at 1 cent
below the typical market price.
The technology’s tradeoffs But of course, as always, this isn’t a silver
bullet to fix climate change, and it does have its caveats.
The first one (which we already discussed) is costs.
Most processes like the ones HIF and Porsche are using are just too expensive to compete
with fossil fuels without government subsidies.
But Prometheus may have already fixed that.
But the second most important drawback is that the whole process relies on renewable
energy.
This creates a problem when you consider that we don’t even have enough renewable energy
generation to cover the worldwide electricity demand.
Advocates for e-fuels will say that the key is to set up factories in places with a large
surplus of renewable energy generation and to use e-fuels as a practical, easily transportable
form of energy storage.
That’s why HIF set up shop in Southern Chile, Africa, Australia and in the Us’s sunbelt.
This could make a lot of sense and easily turn into a reliable source of revenue for
the lucky countries that get lots of sunlight, wind, or geothermal energy.
In fact, it may be the only practical way to literally ship “sunlight” and “wind”
energy from one place to another, without having to lay thousands of miles of cables
to send power instead.
Heck, we could even use e-fuels to indirectly distribute nuclear energy worldwide.
We made a recent video that got lots of attention about how Japan coupled their nuclear HTTR
reactor to a red hydrogen manufacturing plant, so perhaps we could do the same with Prometheus’s
Fuel Forges.
The final big issue with e-fuels is efficiency.
There are many steps involved in the process of turning wind or solar energy into e-fuels,
and then burning those e-fuels to extract their energy.
Each one of these processes reduces the overall conversion efficiency of e-fuels as an energy
storage medium.
According to estimates from the International Council of Clean Transportation, this efficiency
could be as low as 16% [source].
So, you’re losing 84% of all the energy you put into making the fuel.
This is mostly due to the fact that have an average efficiency of just 20–35%, so we
can’t get more than that no matter how good our synthetic process is.
It would make way more sense to use solar and wind energy to charge an EV directly than
to convert the energy into fuel to power a conventional car.
That said, remember that there is still a niche where batteries and electrical motors
simply won’t do the trick, like in airliners and fighter jets, for example.
Also, even if it isn’t as efficient as we’d like it to be, it’s going to take years
for us to replace the global ICE vehicle market with EVs.
So, if we can use e-fuels to stop adding more carbon into the atmosphere with our ICE-powered
cars while we progressively replace them, I say it’s a total win.
If not a definitive solution, this could at least be the perfect bridge between what we
have today, and what we want to have tomorrow.
But I’m dying to know what you guys thought about e-fuels.
Are you as excited as I am about what Prometheus is Promising to do?
They certainly have
the financial muscle and the know-how to pull it off.
Do you have a classic car or vintage motorcycle in your garage that you’re just dying to
fill up with the first batch of e-fuel you can find?
Shout out in the comments section below.
That’s it for this video, I hope you enjoyed this video and I’m looking forward to reading
what you have to say.