Tag: synthetic fuels

On EV tanks, stupid politicians and Finnish cobalt…

On By ChristofferIn News, Opinion1 Comment

When I grew up, I remember my parents speaking of most political leaders with (sometimes great) respect. Churchill was still in vivid memory for many, as was JFK. De Gaulle in France was seen as a true statesman and in general as I remember it, although people didn’t necessarily agree with the political leader of the time, there was a fundamental respect for those leading a country.

Oh how times have changed in this regard. It’s a long debate well beyond this blog to try to define where things went in the wrong direction, but what it’s lead to is no doubt an environment where at least some political leaders deserve far less respect than used to be the case. Then again, the blame on that falls on us since in the end, we’re the ones who somehow, directly or indirectly, elected them…

This is not the face of reason. Jennifer Granholm, US Energy Secretary (Source Fox News)

An example in the category of those not deserving much respect is US Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who a few weeks ago stated that she fully supports efforts from the Biden administration to require (among others) the U.S. military to implement an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030. Granholm says that global events like the war in Ukraine aren’t good for (fossil) energy security, conveniently “forgetting” that the US is pretty much self-sufficient in oil.

The team at Doomberg (an excellent geopolitical newsletter I highly recommend to anyone interested) calculated what it would take to electrify the main US battle tank M1 Abrams, weighing 60 tons. The answer is a battery pack weighing 2/3 of the vehicle itself, i.e. 40 tons, and being roughly the size of the tank itself. I’m sure the US military is thrilled at the prospect, and probably also curious as to how Granholm plans to ensure war zones are well covered with charging stations!

No, this isn’t it either. Robert Habeck, Germany’s Finace and Climate Minister

Idiocy is certainly not limited to the US. In Europe the undisputed champion is of course Germany, a country that used to be the backbone of the European economy but that now has transformed to a schoolbook example of failed energy policy. Germany’s Finance and Climate Minister, aka Green Party leader Habeck fully supports the recent decision to turn off the remaining German nuclear plants, while seeing no problem with those in war-torn Ukraine, a country currently being bombed on a daily basis and very much in “nuclear radiation” distance from Germany, continuing to be operational. Nope, I’m not making this up.

Another European privilege is to have a large bunch of politicians in the EU Parliament in Brussels representing the EU member states. They have now – hallelujah! – discovered that there is a risk that neither the lithium, nor certain metals required for the “energy transition” will be available to Europe in the quantities needed over the coming 10 years or so. Well, had they read this blog, for example in early December, they would have saved some time coming to this assessment…

Somehow preferable to a cobalt mine

In order to find a remedy to this annoying reality, various prospecting projects will soon start, aiming to find suitable excavation sites for metals and lithium in Europe itself. There are, hmm, a number of problems with that. Just to name two, there is of course the small fact that the quantities you can hope to find in Europe are far from being sufficient. Also, as opposed to the Congo where we do business by closing your eyes bribing everyone and letting children do the dirty job, that doesn’t really work in Europe.

Take Finland as an example. There is apparently cobalt in various places across the beautiful Finnish landscape of lakes and forests. But, surprise surprise, the Finns would like to keep that landscape as it is and not transform it into a giant cobalt mine. Of course there will be similar resistance in other places as well, meaning that any excavation at all, which again will not cover Europe’s future needs, is at least 10-20 years away, well past the deadline Brussels has set itself.

If your car smokes like this, you should probably see a garage anyway…

Fortunately though the world hasn’t gone completely crazy just yet, because when you really start to lose hope, a few voices of reason have started to emerge. One was heavy lobbying from French and German automakers, resulting in the ban on selling new combustion engine cars being pushed forward from 2030 to 2035, and then also being changed such as to continue to allow combustion as a technology for cars running on clean fuels (more on that below).

Other sensible voices showing resistance is starting to form have included the CEOs of notably Renault and Stellantis who strongly opposed the planned Euro 7 emission rules for diesel and petrol cars, saying the multi-billion investments these would require of manufacturers would only result in a very marginal reduction of greenhouse gases, hardly being worth it if we’re anyway supposed to go all electric a few years later. Or put differently, there’s about 1198 better ways to spend your money…

They are of course right, although if you agree with me (or even if you don’t, but can count), the truth that I’m sure they’re aware of is that full electrification will not happen any time soon, bar a sudden revolution in battery technology. For those new to the blog, this is something I wrote about notably in the post I’ve linked to above (and again here) from December.

A GT4 running on synthetic fuels – no mines required

Interestingly, a lot of people are now all of a sudden also talking about synthetic fuels (see my post from two years ago here on the topic), tacitly admitting as much. This has notably become a big debate in the UK, with pressure being put on politicians to start encouraging promising technologies in the field. Since the post on the topic I linked to above, Porsche has increased production of its synthetic fuels, proving that the technology works, although the cost is still prohibitive and viability of this as a solution at scale is still insecure.

The recognition that the future is perhaps not 100% electric is however best seen in EV prices, when in notably the US market, pre-owned combustion cars are increasing in price again whereas used EV’s have started to fall like stones. As I wrote about back in August last year, that used to be the case for some EV’s but not for others, notably not for Tesla.

If it’s so great Elon, then why are you cutting the price?

Of course, if like Elon Musk you start cutting the prices of new cars (in itself a good sign itself that things aren’t going that well), that’s hardly beneficial for residual values, but even factoring that in, it’s clear that price falls across all EV’s are heavier than before, and bigger than for (at least some) conventional cars. Could it be that when an increasing number of countries have cut subsidies, or when like here in Switzerland, EV’s will need to pay road tax from next year, and when the electricity price has increased quite dramatically, the whole EV thing isn’t as fun any longer?

We’ll see where all this takes us, but at least the question on what our future car landscape will look like has become a bit less one-dimensional. There’s of course many more issues with the planned electrification that I could have added to those above, making me all the more convinced that the future of new cars is somewhere in the triangle modern hybrids – new battery technology – alternative/synthetic fuels, probably in some combination. But while we figure that out, I can’t help hoping that someone with a sense of humour parks an M1 Abrams tank in Secretary Granholm’s driveway.

Can E-fuels save traditional mobility?

On By ChristofferIn Electrical vehicles, News, Opinion2 Comments

Readers of this blog know of my scepticism towards EV’s, not as a concept but as a solution to climate-related issues. I wrote about this in a recent post you can find here, so I won’t repeat myself. To be fair, things are moving in the right direction at least with regards to some of the issues raised, as I also highlighted in my recent post about Mercedes’s new EQS (see here). It does however remain the case that even if EV manufacturers become climate-neutral in their production, as long as the country they produce in is not 100% based on green energy, what they achieve is basically nothing put pushing the dirty energy consumption on to the next guy.

Even the steel is said to be climate neutral in a few years in the production of the EQS and other MB EV’s

There is however another BIG issue around EV’s that no one seems really keen to talk about, namely what on earth we’re supposed to do with the millions of fully functional cars we currently have on our streets, if the plan is to roll out EV’s for all? Don’t laugh, the question risks becoming very real as various European governments start fixing end dates for the sale of new combustion engines. A logical next step is then to start discussing bans on existing cars. But what is the plan for millions of existing and fully functional cars, and even more, what is the carbon footprint of destroying millions of existing cars and building new EV’s? Funnily, this is an aspect that is completely absent from the discussion.

I’m of an optimistic nature so I’d like to think that realism will prevail in the end – a realism that for me needs to be based on a future for traditional mobility – especially (and I’m finally getting to the topic of this week’s post), since traditional mobility doesn’t necessarily mean traditional fuels going forward. The development of so called e-fuels is progressing rapidly, and this week we’ll look at whether they are the solution that will allow for a more reasonable solution to the issue of traditional, personal mobility.

A new 12-cylinder will never be built, but it would be nice if we could still save the old ones!

Electrofuels, also called e-fuels or synthetic fuels, are produced exclusively from renewable energy. Without going into the technical details, in the case of car fuel it means producing hydrogen from clean energy, to which CO2, extracted from other sources, is added. The result is emission-free hydrocarbon, and the resulting synthetic fuels are no technically different to conventional fuels. They can thus power the same cars without modifications and also use the existing fueling infrastructure. A further big advantage is that e-fuels don’t compete with food production, a big problem for example with ethanol production that isn’t very compatible with the world’s need to feed another 3bn people until 2050, using less resources. Disadvantages? Unfortunately, there are a few, and they’re rather big.

Firstly, e-fuels don’t solve the issue of clean energy going to its use as long as the full economy doesn’t use clean energy, as you’re basically just pushing the emission onto someone else. As we’ll see below the clean energy used for e-fuels is produced very far away and thus not cannibalizing on anything else, but this is not a viable, long-term concep. Secondly, e-fuels offer far less efficiency than electricity, as long as electricity production is local. This is however an important point given that, as noted, most countries are still not 100% green in their energy production. So either you push the emission problem onto the next user as noted above, or, and this is not unrealistic, we’ll start importing for example solar energy from a sunny place such as the Middle East. If that becomes the case, then hydrogen all of a sudden becomes very competitive in terms of efficiency as it can be transported much more easily. Thirdly and lastly, as you will have guessed, the production process for e-fuels is far from cheap, and it will still take time and probably also some further technological innovations to solve both the cost and thereby also the required scale issue.

Wind turbines of Project Haru Oni off Chile’s coast

A number of automakers are looking into e-fuels as an alternative or complement to EV’s, none more than Porsche which currently runs a project called Haru Oni off the coast of Chile (where it’s very windy). They do so together with notably Siemens, and the logic for Porsche is that because of the points above and others, conventional electricity alone will not be enough to move to a clean car fleet fast enough, in view of other – rising – electricity needs in the world. The project is still in its early days but by removing CO2 out of the air through wind power and combining it with hydrogen, it aims to produced 130.000 litres of fuel next year, and 550 million litres in 2026. As a reference, around 23bn litres of fuel were consumed in Germany last year so although a lot, it would take many more such installations to get anywhere near the volume required to make this a viable alternative on a larger scale. The cost so far remains a mystery, but it’s clear that it’s nowhere near being a reasonable consumer alternative at this stage.

So at least for now, it remains at best unclear whether e-fuels will give a future to combustion engines. It’s however good to see that some thinking around fuel alternatives is going on and who knows, as so often before, maybe there will be other innovations along the way that allow for even better solutions in the end. It would however be high time for some realism to enter the discussion around EV’s and our future mobility. It would also be desirable with some political willingness to engage in discussions on where the electricity is supposed to come from in the emission-free world, when many countries in parallel wish to phase out nuclear? This can’t possibly be something only a few engineers at Porsche have thought about? And finally, perhaps someone can tell us what the plan is for the many millions of fully-functioning cars in the world? Reality is slightly more complex than what the current debate would have you believe and the sooner we’re mature enough to engage in a difficult but highly necessary discssion on it, the better.