With several pilot projects now underway, could low-CO2 synthetic fuels be about to turn the tide on electrification? Fleet World editor-at-large Alex Grant isn’t convinced.

Fleet World editor-at-large Alex Grant

Normally the gloomiest month of the year, my January was brightened by a long overdue chance to try out the Toyota GR Yaris and, predictably, I’m smitten. It’s a hedonistic final fling for the combustion hot hatch, making as much power as the original Porsche 911 Turbo with half as many cylinders, while complying with ultra-stringent Euro 6 emissions regulations. Modern engines are incredible but, without hybridisation, cars like this will disappear from forecourts within a decade.

Or will they? Wander into some corners of the automotive sphere and you might start to consider e-fuels as a potential ‘saviour’ of combustion engines. They promise a lot; synthetic low (or zero) carbon petrol and diesel made from renewable energy, green hydrogen and captured CO2, compatible with today’s engines and avoiding the need for masses of charging points or expensive battery packs. However, the hype seems to be overlooking some sizeable hurdles.

The highest profile project is from Porsche and Siemens Energy. Their world-first pilot plant recently broke ground in Chile with ambitions to scale up quickly – the target is 550 million litres of e-fuel production by 2026. That’s not small, by any means, but it is tiny in context. According to the RAC Foundation, the UK consumed 46.9 billion litres of petrol and diesel in pre-Covid 2019, which means our tiny island alone would use up all of that capacity in around four days. Porsche said electric vehicles are its “top priority”, while e-fuels will help cut the net CO2 emissions of motorsport, its driver experience centres and sports cars. Hardly mainstream.

Cost is another challenge – volumes are low so prices per litre are very high. In rural Canada, Carbon Engineering is looking to produce cheaper e-fuels by repurposing off-the-shelf equipment, which also makes it quicker to deploy plants all over the world, close to sources of renewable energy. However, cars and vans aren’t at the front of the queue. The company sees trucking, marine and aviation as key markets, as there’s no easy way to decarbonise those vehicles with today’s electrification technology.

Even the oil industry isn’t convinced. In December, Concawe, an environmental research body founded by oil companies almost 60 years ago, put out a detailed rebuttal to a Transport & Environment damning report into the impact of e-fuels. Despite concluding that combustion engines using e-fuels made with 100% renewable energy could match the lifecycle CO2 emissions of an EV, the organisation doesn’t see them as a silver bullet. The report added that EVs use much less energy overall, so electrification is right for cars and e-fuels should be prioritised for heavier-duty vehicles instead.

That’s a hard rationale to argue with. Scaling up e-fuel production requires vast amounts of renewable energy and comes with its own infrastructure challenges, while also not solving some of the wider problems with combustion engines. If you have an electric, hydrogen fuel cell and a combustion engine car all using ‘fuels’ from renewable sources, all three are potentially zero carbon vehicles, but only one of them will emit harmful pollutants at the point of use. That’s also important.

Turning the regulatory tide on EVs – which are more efficient and emit less CO2 emissions and pollutants compared to combustion engines – seems unlikely, especially as manufacturers look towards a more sustainable production process. But that’s never been the point. Decarbonising transport is a nuanced, global challenge which requires multiple complementary solutions, perhaps including hydrogen for heavier vehicles and e-fuels to clean up the legacy combustion engine and hybrid fleet. If that means you can have a GR Yaris (or similar) tucked away for the weekends, then the world will be a brighter place for it.