E‑fuel made of hydrogen

It’s evid­ent to every­one that we can’t keep pump­ing oil and gas to fuel our vehicles for much longer; every liter increases the amount of car­bon diox­ide in the atmo­sphere and warms the Earth. But that doesn’t mean we must scrap or rebuild all vehicles. With hydro­gen pro­duced by elec­tro­lyz­ers powered with fossil-free elec­tri­city and cap­tured car­bon diox­ide, it is pos­sible to cre­ate car­bon-neut­ral equi­val­ents to today’s fuel. These are called elec­tro­fuels, or e‑fuels, and you can learn more about them in this post.

Hydrocarbons

Vir­tu­ally all motor vehicles – cars, trains, boats, planes, and rock­ets – are powered by mix­tures of hydro­car­bons. These chem­ic­al com­pounds are chains and rings of dif­fer­ent num­bers of car­bon atoms from which hydro­gen atoms dangle like charms.

The hydro­car­bons we use to power vehicles come from fossils, mainly algae and plank­ton, which have been trans­formed over hun­dreds of thou­sands of years into gases and the vis­cous yel­low-black liquid we call pet­ro­leum, crude oil, or simply oil. These nat­ur­al resources are refined, cracked, and blen­ded into liquid nat­ur­al gas (LNG), liquid pet­ro­leum gas (LPG), meth­an­ol, jet fuel, gas­ol­ine, ker­osene, dies­el, or oth­er pet­ro­leum products we use to fuel our vehicles.

Unsustainable

As you know, we are extract­ing more gas and oil than nature can restore. This is not sus­tain­able, which the 1973 oil crisis made people pain­fully aware of. But this is a minor con­cern com­pared to the cli­mate crisis we are head­ing straight into.

Burn­ing fossil fuels releases a lot of car­bon diox­ide (CO₂) into the atmo­sphere. This gas traps heat from the sun, like a seal, caus­ing the Earth’s tem­per­at­ure to rise sim­il­ar to how it does in a green­house. This has been known since 1896.

Yes, that’s right. Human­ity has known for over 120 years that our appet­ite for fossil fuels will cre­ate the green­house effect. Yet we went for fossil fuel vehicles instead of con­tinu­ing the early devel­op­ment of altern­at­ives such as elec­tric cars and syn­thet­ic fuels.

Renaissance of good old ideas

Only under the increas­ingly immin­ent threat of melt­ing ice, over­flow­ing seas, water short­ages, and bar­ren farm­land have we begun to look at altern­at­ives. Many ideas from the late 19th and early 20th cen­tur­ies are exper­i­en­cing a renais­sance. Most appar­ent is the resur­rec­tion of the bat­tery elec­tric vehicle (BEV).

But that’s not the only option. Oth­er old ideas that have been revived are using hydro­gen as fuel, either dir­ectly or via con­ver­sion to elec­tri­city. But per­haps the most prom­ising short-term solu­tion is syn­thet­ic fuel made from green hydro­gen. So, let’s take a closer look at it.

Electrofuel (e‑fuel)

Elec­tro­fuel, or short­er e‑fuel, is an umbrella term for e‑LNG, e‑LPG, e‑methanol, e‑jet fuel, e‑gasoline, e‑kerosene, e‑diesel and oth­er syn­thet­ic fuels that can replace their non-pre­fixed coun­ter­parts without any modi­fic­a­tion to the engines that use them.

E‑fuels are pro­duced from car­bon diox­ide (CO₂), cap­tured from the atmo­sphere, and hydro­gen, pro­duced by water elec­tro­lys­is using fossil-free elec­tri­city (green hydro­gen or pink hydro­gen).

The first syn­thet­ic fuel was pro­duced in 1920s Ger­many by Franz Fisc­her and Hans Tropsch. Their meth­od has since been refined and fur­ther developed. In the early 2000s, syn­thet­ic fuel got a renais­sance when the idea of e‑fuel began to take shape. Drivers today are car man­u­fac­tur­ers like Porsche and Mazda, oil com­pan­ies like Exxon Mobile, Circle K, Eni, and Repsol, and indus­tri­al groups like Siemens, Bosch, Mahle, and ZF.

Recycling of CO₂

E‑fuels con­tain essen­tial hydro­car­bons found in their con­ven­tion­al coun­ter­parts, enabling them to replace these fossil fuels seamlessly.

How­ever, this raises a ques­tion: if both e‑fuel and its fossil fuel coun­ter­part emit the same amount of car­bon diox­ide when burned, what is the benefit?

Sure, e‑fuel releases as much car­bon diox­ide into the atmo­sphere when com­bus­ted as its fossil-based coun­ter­parts. How­ever, this amount is the same as either cap­tured before it got into the atmo­sphere or taken from the atmo­sphere dur­ing the pro­duc­tion. Thus, the net con­tri­bu­tion is zero. One could say that e‑fuels recycle car­bon dioxide.

Carbon neutral

So, can we say that syn­thet­ic fuel is car­bon neutral?

To make such a bold claim, the pro­cess and the raw mater­i­al must be car­bon neut­ral. This means that the pro­duc­tion plant must be powered by fossil-free energy. It also rules out black, brown, and gray hydro­gen as a feed­stock; such hydro­gen is pro­duced from coal and nat­ur­al gas, which pro­duces huge car­bon diox­ide emissions.

To be truly cli­mate-neut­ral, green or pink hydro­gen must be used. Both are pro­duced by the elec­tro­lys­is of water. Green hydro­gen uses renew­able elec­tri­city from the sun, wind, or water, while pink hydro­gen uses elec­tri­city from nuc­le­ar power plants.

The pre­fix ‘elec­tro’ or just ‘e’ refers to hydro­gen pro­duced by water elec­tro­lys­is using fossil-free elec­tri­city (green hydro­gen or pink hydro­gen). The com­plete pro­duc­tion pro­cess must run on fossil-free energy sources to earn the prefix.

Additional benefits

E‑fuel has three sig­ni­fic­ant bene­fits in addi­tion to being climate-neutral:

1. Exist­ing logist­ics net­works can be used. No new infra­struc­ture is required.
2. Exist­ing tanks in vehicles can be used. No addi­tion­al con­tain­er for gas is required.
3. Exist­ing motors can be used. No hardened motor or con­ver­sion of hydro­gen to elec­tri­city is required.

These advant­ages have giv­en e‑fuel a boost. Around the world, small and large e‑fuel pro­jects are underway.

World’s first commercial plants

Regard­ing e‑fuel pro­duc­tion, the Texas-based com­pany HIF Glob­al has come the furthest.

On 20 Decem­ber 2022, they inaug­ur­ated HIF Haru Oni, the first oper­at­ing e‑fuel facil­ity in the world. The facil­ity, loc­ated in Chile, is com­plete with wind tur­bines to gen­er­ate elec­tri­city, elec­tro­lyz­ers to con­vert the elec­tri­city into hydro­gen, and a dir­ect air cap­ture (DAC) unit to extract car­bon diox­ide from the atmo­sphere. The plant pro­duces e‑LPG, e‑methanol, and e‑gasoline. When fully oper­a­tion­al, the plant will pro­duce 130,000 liters of e‑fuel annually.

Impress­ive. But HIF Haru Oni is noth­ing com­pared to the company’s next plant. In Texas, they are build­ing the HIF Matagorda eFuels Facil­ity, which, when com­pleted in 2027, will pro­duce 750 mil­lion liters of e‑fuel each year. The elec­tro­lyz­ers will have a total expec­ted capa­city of about 1.8 gigawatts and pro­duce about 300,000 tonnes of green hydro­gen annually.

And it doesn’t stop there. HIF plans to build 12 plants of the same mega-size dis­trib­uted across Chile, the US, and Australia.

One of the largest investors in the com­pany is the Ger­man car com­pany Porsche. They have inves­ted over 100 mil­lion USD in e‑fuel. Porsche plans to run its entire Super­cup racing series and all the cars at its Porsche Exper­i­ence Centres on the fuel.

Europe’s largest e‑methanol project

E‑fuel pro­duc­tion facil­it­ies are also being built in Europe. Flag­shi­pONE, out­side Örnskölds­vik in north­ern Sweden, will pro­duce 55,000 tons of e‑methanol when it is oper­a­tion­al in 2025. This makes it the largest of its kind in Europe.

The four elec­tro­lyz­ers used by Flag­shi­pONE will have a total capa­city of about 70 mega­watts and pro­duce about 12 tons of green hydro­gen per year.

The car­bon diox­ide will be sourced from the adja­cent muni­cip­al heat and power plant, which burns bio­mass. The plant will also sup­ply steam and water to the pro­cess. The excess heat will then be fed into the municipality’s loc­al dis­trict heat­ing network.

Flag­shi­pONE will sup­ply an increas­ing num­ber of ships that run on methanol.

Future prospects

Naysay­ers and detract­ors of e‑fuel claim it is a dead end; e‑fuel is costly and a waste of energy.

They may be right regard­ing pas­sen­ger cars and many oth­er types of land trans­port­a­tion. Most of these vehicles are likely to be bat­tery-powered. That tech­no­logy has come a long way and is much cheap­er per kilo­met­er driv­en than e‑fuel.

But oth­er­wise, they are wrong. Fuel pro­duced syn­thet­ic­ally from green hydro­gen and cap­tured car­bon diox­ide will be one of sev­er­al suc­cess­ful solu­tions to power vehicles. No single solu­tion works for every­one and everything, so a vari­ety of solu­tions are needed.

Ship­ping is a good example. Most experts agree that e‑fuel is the only viable car­bon-neut­ral fuel for large ships like con­tain­er ves­sels. These ships use highly pol­lut­ing fossil fuels, respons­ible for 3% of the world’s CO2 emis­sions. We need e‑fuel to address this. Bat­ter­ies for such ships would be too huge and heavy.

The same goes for air­planes, which also can­not have large and heavy bat­ter­ies on board.

In addi­tion to these mega mar­kets, there will also be niche mar­kets. One is vehicles that can be used where char­ging from a reli­able, clean elec­tri­city grid is impossible.

Anoth­er is sports cars, racing cars, and vin­tage cars, where the sound of an engine rev­ving, the weight, or the pre­ser­va­tion of cul­tur­al her­it­age is more important.

In short, the future of e‑fuels is bright and has already begun.