Link: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-solutions/making-synthetic-fuels-a-swiss-scientists-bid-to-decarbonise-cars-and-planes/91545906

Excerpt from the article:

Millions of combustion engines – powering machines, vehicles and aircraft – will remain in use for decades to come. Instead of replacing them, a Swiss chemical engineer is developing a greener alternative: a synthetic, “drop‑in” fuel that works with existing engines and infrastructure.

Inside her labyrinthine lab at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) in Dübendorf, a network of pipes and custom-built modules hums away as Alessia Cesarini shows off the prototype e-fuel unit she took two years building.

She aims to turn it into a business offering a viable alternative to conventional fossil fuels.

“There are lots of systems with combustion engines still running, and the idea is to provide a locally produced and less-polluting solution,” she explains.

Transport accounts for 47% of Switzerland’s energy-related CO2 emissions, versus 25% globally. A Swiss study estimates that around two million combustion-driven vehicles will remain on the country’s roads by 2040. Globally, Bloomberg estimates that 55% of cars will still run on combustion engines by that time. Also, for hard‑to‑abate sectors such as aviation, long‑term decarbonisation will depend heavily on the adoption of renewable fuels.

Cesarini’s approach is simple: “The goal is a solution that works with existing vehicles and infrastructure – sustainable both environmentally and economically,” she says.

I am curious about the costs of this fuel. At the moment, electrification of traffic is cheaper and easier in most sectors and synthetic fuels are prohibitively expensive. Also, CO₂ emissions from burning fuel is not the only problem with our current traffic system, congestion, particulate matter and noise are huge issues, too.
We need to reduce individual motorised traffic (too many (and too big) cars with only the driver in it), improve and expand public transportation, walkability of cities etc.
But for sectors where these measures and transformations are not feasable or even possible (like air and ocean travel and cargo), alternatives like synthetic, emission free fuels are badly needed.

Big oil will erase any news regarding this research in the best case scenario

No, they'll just buy it and either use it or bury it, depending on the economics.

The cycle starts with carbon dioxide (CO2) being removed from the biosphere or atmosphere and transformed into alcohols like methanol or ethanol.

This part seems problematic. There's not a lot of specifics in the article, so I assume for the research they are just using supplied CO~2~, it doesn't sound like they're actually doing any atmospheric gas capture and refining as part of this work.

Based on this, the fuel itself won't be any less polluting. The green side of it depends on recapturing CO~2~ from the environment, which will ultimately be released again when the fuel burns.

The biggest upshot is that this possibly creates an economic motivation for carbon capture, rather than just being a dead-end cost sink, and that might be helpful. If you can make a profit pulling CO~2~ out of the atmosphere and reselling it as fuel, there might be actual demand for this technology.

Two problems:

1. The cost to implement the capture-refine-synthesize process will have to beat out the existing oil industry's drill-pump-refine process. I doubt OPEC will be a friendly competitor.

2. Best case scenario, this turns into net-zero carbon fuel for vehicles. It doesn't actually reduce the average level of carbon in the atmosphere, because what is capture is constantly released again. Still, if this pushes money into the carbon capture industry that could be beneficial.

I agree. Might be a good thing for aviation and other sectors without a good alternative. But additionally it will be badly inefficient. Even if the production process is good, the best diesel efficiency factor is around 40%.

Technically it won't be emission-free. The idea is to derive synthesized fuel from captured CO~2~. The CO~2~ will be re-emitted when the fuel burns.

This research does not address the carbon capture part of the cycle, just the fuel synthesizing part.

The researcher will mysteriously disappear

Synthetic fuels will never be competitive with renewables outside of specific applications, e.g. aviation. It's simple physics. You simply can't beat charging a battery from solar panels and then driving off. Putting multiple steps in between just makes it all very inefficient.

Just as preventing waste beats recycling, saving energy beats renewables. "E-fuels" are extremely inefficient and consume four to six times as much electricity as just using a battery would. While Switzerland is producing a lot of electricity from hydropower, they also depend on non-renewable nuclear power sources and its still unsolved dangerous waste problems. As long as countries depend heavily on fossils for electricity, it's better to sell any potential excess clean electricity (not fossils, not nuclear) to them. Using electricity to generate fuels at a >80% efficiency loss instead of sending it to where it's needed increases carbon emissions, instead of decreasing them.

For 0,01% of combustion engines maybe. Also the article is extremely vague.

Combustion is inherently extremely inefficient

This is what they wrote in the article

[…] and initial estimates suggest it could be cost-competitive with fossil gasoline once produced at an industrial scale.

I guess it‘s very vague and honestly I don‘t know anything about this field. The article just felt uplifting for me, hence why I posted it.

The way I understood is not to compete with the ongoing elecrification of traffic but to develop an alternative for the remaining combustion engines that will likely stay for who knows how long.

The idea (I think) would be for it to replace fossil fuels before EVs become the norm in places like the US. Considering orange man's very clear goal to wipe EVs off the face of the country, I think this is an admirable goal but one that is misplaced as the real solution would be for the US to somehow get someone from the DSA, or even more left, in the white house.

Korea had fuel alternatives once like synthetic petrol, Korean big oil lobbied it and killed it

Maybe it's a local thing, but here in Germany, the liberal party (FDP, neoliberals mostly) and others who do not want to make the adjustments necessary to limit climate change are pushing synthetic fuels ("E-Fuels") and use them as an excuse to block any actualy effective measures.

Again, there are uses for such fuels, but they are very limited.

The reason President Pedophile wants to block alternative energy is to enrich the people selling oil, so synthetic fuel doesn't solve the critical problem: oil billionaires haven't been eliminated yet.

Replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuels is entirely infeasible. Building out the infrastructure at the gigantic scale required would take decades in the best case scenario. This stuff has always been a pipe dream and a diversion tactic. The real solution is renewable energy. The transition is currently happening and pretty much unstoppable at this point. The fossil shaggers are just trying to squeeze as much profit out of their obsolete technology as they can and they'll literally rather burn the planet than give up a single cent.

Even if it was a little more than normal gasoline, it’s heavily preferred by us. We don’t drive but if our bus d tickets get a little more expensive because of it that’s fine by us. We have preference to electric buses overall but if we need the gas buses then this would be a far better alternative

I agree with you, but I was trying to frame it optimistically for our current fascist hellscape

The people involved should probably prepare their own meals and have daily check-ins with their loved ones

This is what we've needed for decades. We already make and use bio-diesel. Why not bio-petrol?

There is no mention of the EROI (Energy Return On Investment) in the article but I very strongly suspect that it is under 1.

Meaning that it take more energy to make this fuel that this fuel can restitute.

It's good for the very fee cases where fossil fuel absolutely cannot be replaced but it's not a viable source of energy. It's just another form of inefficient battery.

Europe is obsessed with the idea of green gas. This will take as much energy to make as it produces, and in the end, the same profile of combustion products.

Just burn ethanol.

Which emissions? It's a hydrocarbon, it will make C02.

If people want clean burning fuel from renewable sources that can be made anywhere, see ethanol.

We have known how to make biopetro for many years. The process Germany used to turn coal into petrol in WWII works just find using biological sources of carbon instead of coal. These days we use that process for synthetic motor oil. Once in a while a race car will use it to get the perfect molecules for their needs (more energy per unit)

In all cases the problem is the cost of fuel is around 5x what pumped crude costs so you would only use it when some thing other than cost is most important.

The real question is can they make this more coat effective?

Sure buddy, like those guys who made cars run on water.

Germany scaled the process up to nearly all their fuel needs in WWII.

No they didn't. They created liquid fuels from coal. And it was ludicrously inefficient and unsustainable.

Net emissions. If the fuel is made from captured CO~2~, there may be some loss in manufacturing but it won't be nearly as emitting as the current process of extracting and refining virgin oil into petrol.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the carbon capture stuff will either be pipe dreams or scams.

It was ludicrously inefficient and unsustainable. However it worked and scaled up. The process is still used today to make synthetic oil from natural gas. Any source of carbon can be used, coal is what Germany had.

I think the thing to remember about orange man is he's always for sale to the highest bidder. So yeah, he'll lie all day for fossil fuel ghouls so they can milk the last drops from their land, tool and infrastructure investments.

But at the end of the day, the sum of other industries is bigger than fossil fuel. They want cheaper energy and independence from fossil supply chain, and their lobbying dollars will overtake the fossil industry's.

Bio fuels don't make sense. You need fossil fuels to produce fertilizer and to power all machines to seed, harvest and transport the corn or grain. Depending on who you ask, in the end you get between 0.8 to 1.2l of ethanol out of each liter of fossil fuel.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the carbon capture stuff will either be pipe dreams or scams.

Keep in mind, people said this about both wind turbines and solar panels in the 90s, that they would never be efficient enough to be worthwhile, that they were just money pits and the people taking government money to develop prototype projects were scammers.

Ethanol has too low of an energy density; it's a bad fuel. The only reason countries dilute gasoline with it is because the inputs are so heavily subsidized.

“In general terms you can reduce your emission, based on which source you take, theoretically up to 100%,” she says. “More realistically, it will be around 90–95%.”

The "based on which source you take" part is referring to where the CO~2~ comes from. The emission reduction number she's giving is for the whole cycle, not for the output of an engine burning the synthetic fuel.

It is the same as with green hydrogen or electric cars.

We do not need energy sources. We already have a cheap energy source (wind, sun, nuclear energy...)

We need "a battery" that can be used in cars and allows for long ranges or at least can be quickly recharged. And fuel from carbon capture fits this criteria.

decarbonise

If your furel contains carbon, you're not decarbonizing anything, you're just changing the source where the fuel comes from.

You want decarboned fuel? Hydrogen, or you get to "just plain" electricity

I don't think anyone claims that these synthetic fuels use less energy to produce than other storage mechanisms. This is just a way to store energy in a way that is very dense, measured by both mass and volume.

Capture is a lot less concrete, more nebulous and it's harder to verify it's happening. At least with today's tech. A massive bait and switch has already happened with Canada's program, which as it happens will only capture carbon which represents a fraction of the externalities of shipping it around.

I'm hopeful it will be good for aviation. It's pretty hard to compete with kerosene's 46.2 MJ/kg. The best batteries today are around 300 Wh/kg in commercial use, and some labs have hit 700+ Wh/kg. But with a MJ being equal to 278 Wh, we're still talking 20-50x the energy density by weight. And that's before even talking about how chemical fuels that are burned off leave less weight behind for the remaining vehicle, whereas a discharged battery weighs pretty much the same as a fully charged battery.

Also, if we do move to storing energy in chemical bonds, pulling carbon out of the air, that basically turns into a carbon sequestration technique with whatever excess solar/wind energy we end up with, especially if we intentionally overbuild the capacity for non-peak production, and leave a method for using that energy during peak periods.

I skimmed the article, but isn't this similar to what the guy in Georgia (US) has been doing for a while now, converting plastic into what he calls "plastoline"?

I'm pretty sure that's the point of it, it's not meant to be a broad solution, but a solution for the things it's needed for

Many countries run on pure ethanol. You're just parroting gas and oil bots on Reddit.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1092181_a-brief-history-of-ethanol-in-brazil

The Indy 500 has run on alcohols since 1965. Entire dragster classes run on ethanol. Pretty good for a bad fuel.

Hydrogen would be a much better form of power for long haul, at least for ships and diesel trains and trucks. By weight it is more energy dense than gasoline but volume is the problem, however for a big ship or a train it makes perfect sense. Point to point intermodal logistics hubs with hydrogen production at either end produced entirely by excess renewable during the day.

Set up one facility in LA and one in Shanghai for ships transiting between them and that could cut thousands of vehicles worth of emissions for every ship. Expand that out to train terminals, truck stops, and certain airports for the right flights - they’re all generally located in the same area anyways.

The problem is the cost of production, but the solution is having so much excess solar generation throughout the day that the cost to produce becomes competitive. Battery tech can always improve, but hydrogen tech is here right now and available today, and only really requires the right incentive structure. Just building out solar panels to lower electricity prices low enough could do that.

Depending on who you ask

Asking gas and oil. These stupid comparisons pollute the internet, because they do all the math for every step of ethanol production, but assume gas comes from a gas pump. Never talk about how much energy is used to mine, refine petroleum. Of course, they gloss over two major points: Ethanol burns cleaner, cooler in motors, making them last much longer and growing crops for ethanol fixes carbon from the air. The leftover mash from corn alcohol is then used as a very rich livestock feed. But you can make ethanol from any plant.

Just an example: to make one barrel of "oil" from the tar sands in Alberta, takes 2 barrels of water and 13 cubic metres of "natural" gas. That's to just get it out of the ground, then the sludge is shipped 3500km to Texas to be refined using more energy - 15% of all the electricity made in the USA. We would be better off just running cars on LPG.

Carbon capture is not efficient. Neither is hydrogen that needs to be trucked around and stored cryogenically.

That's not correct.

I doubt that is true. They could not make it cheap enough.

Ethanol is carbon capture.

This isn't parroting, ethanol just isnt as energy dense as petrol - thats a fact. Also, because some countries are using this fuel it doesn't magically make it good.