Excerpt from the article:
Millions of combustion engines – powering machines, vehicles and aircraft – will remain in use for decades to come. Instead of replacing them, a Swiss chemical engineer is developing a greener alternative: a synthetic, “drop‑in” fuel that works with existing engines and infrastructure.
Inside her labyrinthine lab at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) in Dübendorf, a network of pipes and custom-built modules hums away as Alessia Cesarini shows off the prototype e-fuel unit she took two years building.
She aims to turn it into a business offering a viable alternative to conventional fossil fuels.
“There are lots of systems with combustion engines still running, and the idea is to provide a locally produced and less-polluting solution,” she explains.
Transport accounts for 47% of Switzerland’s energy-related CO2 emissions, versus 25% globally. A Swiss study estimates that around two million combustion-driven vehicles will remain on the country’s roads by 2040. Globally, Bloomberg estimates that 55% of cars will still run on combustion engines by that time. Also, for hard‑to‑abate sectors such as aviation, long‑term decarbonisation will depend heavily on the adoption of renewable fuels.
Cesarini’s approach is simple: “The goal is a solution that works with existing vehicles and infrastructure – sustainable both environmentally and economically,” she says.
I am curious about the costs of this fuel. At the moment, electrification of traffic is cheaper and easier in most sectors and synthetic fuels are prohibitively expensive. Also, CO₂ emissions from burning fuel is not the only problem with our current traffic system, congestion, particulate matter and noise are huge issues, too.
We need to reduce individual motorised traffic (too many (and too big) cars with only the driver in it), improve and expand public transportation, walkability of cities etc. But for sectors where these measures and transformations are not feasable or even possible (like air and ocean travel and cargo), alternatives like synthetic, emission free fuels are badly needed.This is what they wrote in the article
[…] and initial estimates suggest it could be cost-competitive with fossil gasoline once produced at an industrial scale.
I guess it‘s very vague and honestly I don‘t know anything about this field. The article just felt uplifting for me, hence why I posted it.
The way I understood is not to compete with the ongoing elecrification of traffic but to develop an alternative for the remaining combustion engines that will likely stay for who knows how long.
Technically it won’t be emission-free. The idea is to derive synthesized fuel from captured CO2. The CO2 will be re-emitted when the fuel burns.
This research does not address the carbon capture part of the cycle, just the fuel synthesizing part.
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Which emissions? It’s a hydrocarbon, it will make C02.
If people want clean burning fuel from renewable sources that can be made anywhere, see ethanol.
Net emissions. If the fuel is made from captured CO2, there may be some loss in manufacturing but it won’t be nearly as emitting as the current process of extracting and refining virgin oil into petrol.
Hopefully I’m wrong, but I think a lot of the carbon capture stuff will either be pipe dreams or scams.
Hopefully I’m wrong, but I think a lot of the carbon capture stuff will either be pipe dreams or scams.
Keep in mind, people said this about both wind turbines and solar panels in the 90s, that they would never be efficient enough to be worthwhile, that they were just money pits and the people taking government money to develop prototype projects were scammers.
Capture is a lot less concrete, more nebulous and it’s harder to verify it’s happening. At least with today’s tech. A massive bait and switch has already happened with Canada’s program, which as it happens will only capture carbon which represents a fraction of the externalities of shipping it around.
My impression is that it is usually a very different group of people saying carbon capture is an impractical solution to the people saying wind turbines or solar are a pipedream
My impression has generally been that folks with expertise have felt like carbon capture is an impractical moneysink, vs climate change deniers trying to say the solutions presented could never work
But perhaps I am wrong and there is a meaningful body of experts who thinks carbon capture is an important and viable tool, and/or have been a meaningful body of experts who thought wind power or solar would never have promise. I’m not the most knowledgeable on this subject
“In general terms you can reduce your emission, based on which source you take, theoretically up to 100%,” she says. “More realistically, it will be around 90–95%.”
The “based on which source you take” part is referring to where the CO2 comes from. The emission reduction number she’s giving is for the whole cycle, not for the output of an engine burning the synthetic fuel.
Synthetic fuels will never be competitive with renewables outside of specific applications, e.g. aviation. It’s simple physics. You simply can’t beat charging a battery from solar panels and then driving off. Putting multiple steps in between just makes it all very inefficient.
The idea (I think) would be for it to replace fossil fuels before EVs become the norm in places like the US. Considering orange man’s very clear goal to wipe EVs off the face of the country, I think this is an admirable goal but one that is misplaced as the real solution would be for the US to somehow get someone from the DSA, or even more left, in the white house.
The reason President Pedophile wants to block alternative energy is to enrich the people selling oil, so synthetic fuel doesn’t solve the critical problem: oil billionaires haven’t been eliminated yet.
I’m hopeful it will be good for aviation. It’s pretty hard to compete with kerosene’s 46.2 MJ/kg. The best batteries today are around 300 Wh/kg in commercial use, and some labs have hit 700+ Wh/kg. But with a MJ being equal to 278 Wh, we’re still talking 20-50x the energy density by weight. And that’s before even talking about how chemical fuels that are burned off leave less weight behind for the remaining vehicle, whereas a discharged battery weighs pretty much the same as a fully charged battery.
Also, if we do move to storing energy in chemical bonds, pulling carbon out of the air, that basically turns into a carbon sequestration technique with whatever excess solar/wind energy we end up with, especially if we intentionally overbuild the capacity for non-peak production, and leave a method for using that energy during peak periods.
decarbonise
If your furel contains carbon, you’re not decarbonizing anything, you’re just changing the source where the fuel comes from.
You want decarboned fuel? Hydrogen, or you get to “just plain” electricity
The problem with carbon based fuels is that we’re unburying them and releasing carbon into the atmosphere which was sequestered under the ground for millions of years, a LOT of it.
If he’s taking solar power + CO2 from the air to make his fuel, then when he burns it it’s just a closed cycle system, at least no new harm done, just returning the carbon previously captured from the air in the process.
There is no mention of the EROI (Energy Return On Investment) in the article but I very strongly suspect that it is under 1.
Meaning that it take more energy to make this fuel that this fuel can restitute.
It’s good for the very fee cases where fossil fuel absolutely cannot be replaced but it’s not a viable source of energy. It’s just another form of inefficient battery.
I don’t think anyone claims that these synthetic fuels use less energy to produce than other storage mechanisms. This is just a way to store energy in a way that is very dense, measured by both mass and volume.
