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2) Petrol is great for passenger cars, but the world runs on diesel and fuels that are more or less equivalent to diesel, like Jet-1A. Can they make that?
> it’s safe to assume that it’ll likely charge a hefty premium over traditional gasoline. > Also worth noting is that while, yes, this synthetic fuel appears to make vehicles slightly more efficient, it still greatly trails the efficiency of EVs. Consequently, vehicles using this fuel will likely always be more expensive to drive per mile than their electric equivalents. So why are we doing this again?
> it’s safe to assume that it’ll likely charge a hefty premium over traditional gasoline. > Also worth noting is that while, yes, this synthetic fuel appears to make vehicles slightly more efficient, it still greatly trails the efficiency of EVs. Consequently, vehicles using this fuel will likely always be more expensive to drive per mile than their electric equivalents. So why are we doing this again?
But in the end (25 years+) I think synthetics will be used for hobbyists to run their vintage vehicles on track days and weekends.
EVs are much more efficient and better for the environment beyond the most obvious and biggest benefit of not having a tailpipe that spews CO2 into the air.
In other words; nobody should be hoping "carbon neutral fuel" is a path to continuing our status quo.
> Simply put, the synthetic fuel operated much like normal gasoline would have, without the emission drawbacks of the latter. Hmmm. The fuel is hydrocarbons; so the emissions are at minimum CO2 and particulates.
1) How much of this fuel could be made at scale — how much of the type of agricultural waste they use is available worldwide? 2) Petrol is great for passenger cars, but the world runs on diesel and fuels that are more or less equivalent to diesel, like Jet-1A. Can they make that?
There is no surprise that synthetic fuels work. They worked for the nazis in the 1940s and they still produce them in South Africa, Qatar and other places. In fact in a lot of ways they are better than today’s gasolines because they have a low aromatic and olefin content. The question revolve around affordability and sustainability. Most of the interest was driven by fears we would be running out of oil, now it is dr…
Current synthetic fuels cost around 10€/litre, which comes to around $37/gallon. Not really viable for day to day use yet.
No not really but, when it peaked I saw 2.40 eur/litre (9.71$/gallon, now down to 1.80 eur/litre) in places... Of course, much of that is taxes, but hey, this stuff would receive a lot of subsidies.
Fwiw, I once (4 years ago or so?) spoke to someone from an ICE conference (a parallel conference to my breast cancer conference) who explained that ICE's can be made 100% clean (just output CO2 and H2O) and 100% circular (take all that emitted CO2 out of the air again), it's just an economic consideration, technologically we are there (I guess that is true for many if not most environment related technologies, we just never take environmental damage along in the price of products, in a way we make them artificially cheap).
The first is that solar PV has already well exceeded the efficiency of growing crops for fuel by multiples. Then there’s wind, nuclear, hydro, etc. Biofuels consume far more land than renewable and zero carbon ways of generating electricity. Even worse they consume fresh water. Electric generation consumes very little water by comparison.
Secondly and related to this biofuels compete with agriculture for food. You frequently hear about using farm waste but there is only so much of that. Our machines use more calories than we do so try to scale that up and soon you are growing crops for cars. That’s a bad path to go down in a world where population is expected to peak as high as 11 billion. Much better to run machines on stuff we can’t eat than to set up a competition.
The only good bet against EVs is in heavy and long range vehicles not cars. I am skeptical of electric trucks not because they can’t be done but because I am skeptical of our will to build out adequate charge infrastructure. But trucks account for a lot less liquid fuel use than cars so solving the car problem is a huge win. If we electrified light vehicles we could cut liquid fuel use by more than 50%.
That doesn’t mean all car companies should totally cease ICE production though. There will still be some market for them into the foreseeable future. I expect EVs to take the bulk of the market though.
I support anything that keeps the wonderful Miata just as it is. (Okay, fine. I more so support anything that keeps the earth healthy and sustainable.)
It sounds like they ran it on straight ethanol. This isn't new or news. Many production cars can run on straight E in good weather. The mileage claim doesn't make sense though because ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline. It'd be nice if this blogspam linked to the source so we could verify details.
I looked at several other sources covering this and they're all similarly quiet about what the fuel actually is. Looking at they supplier's (Coryton's) website, they boast about 'bespoke' synthetic fuels. So I'm guessing it's Mazda that's being shy about the details.