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.
