Synthetic fuels - an environmental game changer

In the Adam Smith Institute we have long argued that government should set the targets rather than mandating the technology to achieve them. In this way we allow competing ideas to be developed that can achieve the goals in different, and often unpredictable, ways.

Governments have decided that petrol and diesel vehicles are to be phased out and then eliminated to remove the pollutants they emit. They are to be replaced by electric, or possibly hydrogen powered vehicles. This misses the point spectacularly. As Tim Worstall of this parish has pointed out, petrol and diesel engines are not the causes of pollution. The fuel they use is the cause, rather than the engines themselves.

If a non-polluting fuel could be devised, the engines could continue in use without the detrimental effects of fossil fuels, and if the new fuels were compatible with existing internal combustion engines, there could be huge savings to be made by going green in a far less costly way.

Step forward the new kid on the block. Two weeks ago Porsche committed itself to the mass production of synthetic fuels at plants in South America. Synthetic fuel – called eFuel by Porsche – is created by splitting water into oxygen and green hydrogen, then combining CO2 with the green hydrogen to produce synthetic methanol, which is then converted into eFuel, which can be used in regular combustion engines. Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF), backed by Porsche, uses a variant of the Fischer–Tropsch process, originally developed in 1926, to make complex hydrocarbons out of air and water.

In a demonstration, the automaker filled up a 911 Carrera and drove it on synthetic fuel for the first time. The potential is huge. Without using fossil fuels it can synthesize fuels for internal combustion engines, and even aviation fuel. The process releases oxygen into the air as it combines the carbon with hydrogen. Even without carbon sequestration being developed for its exhausts, it would be carbon neutral, with fewer particulates emitted than fossil fuels put out.

The European Union has sensibly stepped back from its plan to ban all combustion-engined cars from 2035. A new agreement will see the creation of a class of cars that can only run on carbon-neutral e-fuels.

In the 1950s there was an urban myth that inventors had created a tablet that turned water into automotive fuel, but the wicked oil companies had bought the technology and suppressed it. It won’t be that simple or that cheap, but it does look as though people might well be driving with fuel almost literally plucked from thin air. And it will be much greener than current fuels.