A lot of corporate speak in this press release, but maybe someone with a better background can break this down.
A lot of corporate speak in this press release, but maybe someone with a better background can break this down.
I'm afraid I have no insight, but I'm certainly curious.
It's been a couple of months since I looked into this, so my memory may be hazy but I think they're taking electricity made by renewables and using that to make hydrogen. Then the hydrogen is used to make methanol, and that's then turned into this E fuel. Each of those steps is energy intensive though, so it's not the most efficient process, and that's why the stuff is like $37/gal currently, and their goal is to get it down to $7-9/gal.
This is Porsche doing what they can to try and make their expensive, vintage vehicles viable a little longer. That's pretty cool if you're wealthy enough to drive a vintage Porsche and don't mind paying a bunch to fuel it.
But this fuel isn't a savior. It may be close to carbon neutral when it's done but it will still have tailpipe emissions (NOx, hydrocarbons, particulates, etc) that are bad for people and the environment. And at any point in the manufacturing process, they could stop and use that energy/fuel more efficiently.
They could just stop after making the green electricity and use it to charge an EV. Or they could stop after making the "green hydrogen" and use it to fill a fuel cell (sacrificing some systemic efficiency but you'd still be both carbon neutral and have no tailpipe emissions). They could stop after turning it into methanol and use it in a flex fuel type vehicle (one more inefficient process and now you get tailpipe emissions), or you can do one final process and turn it into this E Fuel for your expensive vintage vehicle.
So it's a neat idea, and if we're going to keep vintage ICE's on the road it's probably better than our current process of pumping/refining exploding dino juice out of the ground. But I'm also not convinced that this is some gamechanging idea that makes ICEs suddenly have no environmental impact, or that any of this really makes sense in the "big picture", other than a specific niche market.
If the hydrogen is green and the carbon used is from environmentally captured sources, it would be close to neutral. You have a point about non CO2 emissions, but if there is a large swing to BEV and FCEV those sorts of emissions will be minimal.
In reply to Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) :
Right, but if we do see large scale BEV or FCV adoption, then we may need to ensure that whatever electricity or hydrogen that we create is used as efficiently as possible to support the demand from those areas, rather than subjecting them to multiple other energy intensive processes.
I think of it as how many miles can be traveled per kwh generated. *All following figures are just SWAG values used to illustrate a point* If a single kwh of electricity is generated from green energy, it's pretty straightforward to get that into a BEV. With transmission and charging losses, you're probably around 80-90% of that original kwh being used to propel that vehicle. If that single kwh is used to create hydrogen through a 70% efficient process, then you're getting about 55-65% of the energy from that original kwh. If there's then another process that's maybe 50% efficient to turn that hydrogen into methanol and pump the fuel into a vehicle that's only 35-45% efficient itself, then you approach a point where only 17-20% of the energy from that original kwh is actually being used to propel things, and likely even less than that if we convert the methanol to this e fuel. It all really means that with each refining/manufacturing step we have to have more power generation for a vehicle to travel a mile.
If there's plenty of electrical generation to support our needs in other areas, then sure, go ahead and do some extra work to create this synthetic fuel.
Don't think in terms of efficiency, at the point we are considering syngas the renewables penetration is huge and there is likely time of day gluts that can be taken up by green H2 production (and this would be leveraging negative time of use electricity pricing and actually a demand service as well, possible multiple revenues). More of a past 2030 scenario but some of this may happen in some corners of the globe before that.
All of it is moot if you can still turn dead things into motive power legally.
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