Porsche's E-Fuel Can BANKRUPT The EV Industry!

With all-electric cars quickly taking over the road transportation game and our governments developing an ever-increasing desire to phase out whatever adds more carbon to our already exploited atmosphere, internal combustion engines are already bound for an overdue extinction and are soon to be a thing of the past. Or are they?

It might not be game over for ICEs just yet, and that’s because of a phenomenal creation that has literally popped out of nowhere. We are talking about e-fuel! In a real sense, e-fuel didn’t just stem from nowhere but is Porsche’s innovative carbon-neutral fuel. We are very conversant with fossil fuels. They are what our vehicles have been running on for more than a century.

But e-fuel is the newest to the scene and might just have shown up in the nick of time as the last-hour savior of internal combustion engines. So with this new development, it has really become essential to ask whether ICEs are really going to be phased out of the auto industry anytime soon. Or whether there will be a sudden U-turn on the decision to pursue a fully electric automobile future.

While major world forces like the UK and the European Union had initially declared their stoic intentions to ban the selling of cars powered by ICEs by 2035, this newly emergent Porsche creation has included a new clause in the initial statement against the use of vehicles with ICEs. And not just any clause, but an exemption clause that might just represent a U-turn on the initial kick-the-ICEs-off-our-roads decision.

So with e-fuel now in the game, has everything changed for internal combustion engines? Or are EVs still the inevitable next big thing in the auto industry?

For the longest time, ICEs have changed the way we humans transport ourselves. From primitive means of transportation like horseback, carts, and carriages to ICEs, man has always wanted to move faster and better. But that’s not all. With more and more knowledge coming to the fore regarding the impacts of what we do in our environment and how these activities either backfire, leaving us with a near-totally wasted ecosystem or how they better the environment, leading to a greener life for us all, the focus has moved beyond just faster and better transportation to safer and more environmentally friendly options.

At the onset, it seemed we were worlds away from being able to chart any course other than the traditional diesel and petrol-powered engines that had become the primary and only commercially feasible means of power for road transportation worldwide. But about two decades ago, hybrids gradually seeped in, introducing us to a bit of what zero-emission driving feels like.

And with daring, big, bold step-takers like Elon Musk, we’ve begun tasting what a fully-electric driving experience feels like already, although limited to just a few parts of the world owing to the taxing infrastructural demands going fully electric entails. However, Tesla had championed a course in the fully-EV direction after having invested in infrastructure to support switching from internal combustion engines to battery-powered engines. And not just this, but as the leading performer in the EV car market, Tesla has undoubtedly led the world in the journey toward driving fully electric.

But just when other giant automakers like Toyota and Ford have been trying to make the best decision between going forward to fully electric mode, diversifying to hydrogen cells, or staying with the good ole ICEs and getting relegated to insignificance, Porsche has begun shaking the table with the e-fuel from right out of nowhere. And speaking of Porsche coming out of nowhere, Porsche is literally doing what Tesla has been doing with the EVs: charting a new course.

Which, in this case, is the all-new e-fuel course.

So somewhere in Chile, called Puntas Arenas, which translates to "the end of the world" in English, Porsche is building an e-fuel factory to push their dream of keeping ICEs in the game. Well, what’s this much-talked-about alternative fuel that’s fast stealing the show?

What Is E-Fuel?

E-fuel is short for environmental fuel. And unlike traditional gasoline, it is a synthetic fuel, which means humans are responsible for developing it all the way from the ground up. Traditional gasoline is gotten from crude oil, which is rich in hydrocarbons and formed from decomposed plant and animal matter that’s been buried beneath the earth for a very long time.

This is why gasoline is generally referred to as a fossil fuel. The traditional gasoline production process begins with extracting crude oil from natural underground reservoirs, refining it to produce gasoline as one of the fractions, and transporting the resulting gasoline to gas stations where we go for a refill.

However, the major downside to this whole process is that virtually every step involved in exploring and refining crude oil to get gasoline adds to the carbon emitted into the atmosphere, and this is something we don’t want. So, while we’ve been using traditional gasoline for more than a century, that’s really just because there hasn't been any other feasible alternative all the while.

But with e-fuel, things have gotten more exciting, and we’re on the brink of what could be a revolutionary change for the ICEs. But is the production process for e-fuel any different? Just like traditional gasoline, e-fuel is a hydrocarbon. But while producing traditional gasoline involves using crude oil as the hydrocarbon source, e-fuel is gotten from water and air.

The concept behind this process is simple. There is carbon dioxide in the air and hydrogen in water, and if there were a process that could take the hydrogen in water and combine it with carbon isolated from the carbon dioxide in the air, then the result would be a hydrocarbon too; the only difference this time would be that the routes are not the same.

While one process uses crude oil as feedstock, the other uses water and air. So how’s e-fuel made? The e-fuel production process begins with water. Water contains two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule, so the very first step in producing e-fuel involves separating the hydrogen from water.

This is done by an expensive process called electrolysis. Electrolysis is a process in which an electric current is used to drive a non-spontaneous chemical reaction or a reaction that would not ordinarily take place on its own. Essentially, it involves using electricity to break apart a compound into the elements, or ions, that make it up.

To do this, a liquid or molten compound (called an electrolyte) is placed in a container, and two electrodes (usually made of metal) are inserted into the liquid. When a voltage is applied across the electrodes, an electric current flows through the electrolyte and causes chemical reactions to occur at the electrodes. At the negative electrode (called the cathode), positively charged ions in the electrolyte gain electrons and are reduced, while at the positive electrode (called the anode), negatively charged ions lose electrons and are oxidized.

So in the e-fuel production process, a constant electric current is run through water to isolate the hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

When this happens, oxygen goes off into the atmosphere as a gas, and hydrogen is collected at the negative electrode of the electrolysis setup. The next step involves getting carbon from the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and combining it with hydrogen. This is done by a process known as methanol synthesis, which involves mixing carbon dioxide and hydrogen together and allowing the mixture to undergo a series of chemical reactions under certain conditions of temperature and pressure.

The result of this process is methanol. However, that’s not all; the synthesized Methanol still has to be converted to gasoline, and this is done by a process called Methanol to Gasoline Synthesis. This process takes the synthesized methanol through a series of complex processes involving heat and vaporization, and the result is two different gasoline fractions, one light, and the other heavy.

The light and heavy fractions are blended together and refined, resulting in a premium octane gasoline blend. This blend is e-fuel. Now, e-fuel is really no different from traditional gasoline. They even share the same molecular structure and can run engines seamlessly even when mixed with traditional gasoline. The only difference is that e-fuel is carbon neutral. This is because the carbon used in the production of e-fuel is taken from our already polluted atmosphere, and so there is a net zero emission of carbon because the carbon released at the end is already offset during production.

But beyond just emitting net zero carbon, Porsche’s e-fuel plant in Chile is as green as green could get. The plant is wind-powered. And thanks to this source of power, no harmful emissions get released into the atmosphere during the e-fuel production process. However, e-fuel is not economically feasible as of yet, and that’s simply because it’s expensive, as a gallon of Porsche’s e-fuel costs $40. But that’s on one end.

Porsche’s e-fuel plant in Chile produces just a little over 34,000 gallons of e-fuel per year, although the company has plans underway to raise this number to over 14 million gallons by 2026 and ten times this amount by 2028. That said, Porsche is working hard to have e-fuel on the market anytime soon.

With this alternative to EVs, we just have to ask what the future of EVs could be going forward. So with this new development, EVs are in for combat with e-fuel.

Will the future be electric, or will it be e-fueled? The only major hitches to the use of e-fuel right now are its price and the fact that it’s really still in its experimental stages. Besides these, the only other twist to this whole e-fuel story is the fact that e-fuel is only carbon neutral if the process that produces it uses clean energy, and this could be a challenge, as setting up production factories that’ll run entirely on clean energy may

not be possible in certain areas.

EVs undoubtedly stand a good chance, but there are still a lot of challenges that make switching to a fully electric future difficult. So if e-fuel becomes easier to buy and more readily available soon enough, taking the e-fuel route might be easier than going in the EV direction.

Is this bad news for EVs? We can’t tell for certain as of yet what the future will be. As it stands, it could be fully electric, e-fueled, or a combination of both, which should still leave us with ICEs.