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 driven by fears that we won’t run out of oil.
Synthetic fuels are potentially valuable because they allow existing capital assets (internal combustion engines and the industry that produces them, fuel distribution infrastructure) to continue to be used.
I am glad to see research into them continue- it's difficult to predict what will scale well economically in five or ten or thirty years.
For any normal industrial process people would be really delighted that they could use iron as a catalyst but the economics of FT are so bad they've scoured the periodic table for something better and not had much improvement.
Won't engines have to be modified and reprogrammed?
For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.
I don't think there is anyone at all that thinks turning agricultural waste into carbon neutral synthetic fuel for ICE has anything to do with "oil not running out" (which it absolutely is, demand is at all time highs, while production is at 30 year lows and no new major oilfield has opened in the lifespan of most people reading this, just saying).
It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently.
Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.
(Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. )
The synthetic stuff is interesting because it may actually be practically infinite thanks to the fusion reactor in the skies. That is because storing the energy from wind and solar in form of chemical energy solves the storage problem of the renewables. If extracting energy from that storage without polluting the environment becomes viable it can be huge.
Not quite infinite, but renewable: https://edu.rsc.org/news/treasure-from-the-earths-mantle/202...
synthetic hydrocarbons as energy storage is interesting, but all about the economics.
Here is a retrospective: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502609/
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).
What people are hoping for today is to get CO₂ from the atmosphere and hydrogen from H₂O with electricity from solar, wind or nuclear. (Though w/ nuclear you might use thermochemical hydrogen if you can get the temperature up)
The best use case for that I've seen is that the US Navy would like to synthesize jet fuel on aircraft carriers so they don't have to slow down to take on fuel from a tanker -- delivering fuel to an aircraft carrier has to cost more than it costs at your local gas station.
Also I think there is more interest in synthetic fuel for airplanes than cars. That Mazda could almost as easily have been run on ethanol, methanol or maybe even butanol. Even methane isn't that hard. Diesel engines can be run on Dimethyl Ether. Single-entity fuels are more efficient to make than synthetic fuels based on long-chain hydrocarbons.
Aviation, on the other hand, is a place where innovation goes to die, where airlines struggle to replace obsolete electronics, where the #1 and #2 aircraft in the world were designed in 1967 and 1982, etc. (... it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car based on a 1982 design!)
But with greater adoption and more focus the prices are bound to fall.
And the prices of alternatives will be rising, both electricity and hydrocarbon fuels.
Also EVs seem to not be the answer to everything. If you live in a colder climate, out of grid or you need to drive long distances, it is not clear when on whether EVs will become practical for you.
What is the cost of the environmental damage from traditionals?
What is the real cost of the military used to guarantee the delivery of traditionals?
That is the opportunity cost of that same military expense?
Oil refineries, they have a cost.
What happens to the cost of synthetics as production volume increases?
Etc.
We need to consider the full cost landscape, not simply gallon v gallon.
https://www.aspenfuels.us/knowledge/what-is-alkylate-fuel/wh...
> 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?
Keeping in mind that manufacturing new cars (and the associated resource extraction) is extremely carbon intensive, then a carbon neutral-ish fuel might actually be the best option overall on a meaningful timescale.
maybe the government could subsidize it as national debt?
Lithium-Sulfer and/or solid state will also likely come into play.
Aviation though... yeah I think that'll be synth fuel. That'll come down to how cheap solar and wind drop in LCOE in the next decade.
A hybrid can give the best of both worlds. A hybrid with a battery range of 50 miles can reduce your ICE usage by a factor of 10 easily (the vast majority of trips are shorter than that). But a lot of people think that reducing emissions by only 90% is not enough. With this you get to the full 100%.
I too think the 50 mile hybrid would have been a game changer. In an ideal world, 10 years after the Prius release (1997?) in 2007 the US government mandated a 50 mile all-electric range PHEV for all consumer cars.
But now the car companies face a choice: invest in a BEV drivetrain, or invest in a PHEV drivetrain. Almost all will do the BEV, because CEOs that don't get fired (see: BMW, VW, etc).
ICE cars running on renewable but more expensive fuel would provide a good option to the expensive EVs as we ramp down fossil fuels.
it's believed we can have cars and equipment on synthetic fuels producing waaay lower lifetime emissions than equivalent battery electric vehicles
when that's the case, it has potential to reduce the scope of the mobile emissions problem to a degree where we can focus almost exclusively on cleaner centralized energy capture, for which the most difficult engineering has already been done, and storage, which needs more attention and investment either way
it would also allow for a quicker transition away from fossil, by giving people a more affordable transition option (or free, if cars don't need conversion) vs. buying electric, and by using more of the energy infrastructure that's already in place
But in the end (25 years+) I think synthetics will be used for hobbyists to run their vintage vehicles on track days and weekends.
It'd be nice if this blogspam linked to the source so we could verify details.
[1] https://coryton.com/lab/news/mazda-using-sustain-100-per-cen...
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.
There is another engine design, a linear piston engine, which is just a piston connected to a magnet and coil. The engine generates electricity (at a constant speed, constant load) and this is fed to an electric motor. So the car is a hybrid. It's more efficient than a regular engine (which turns a large crankshaft etc.) and the fuel probably can be more finicky since the combustion cycle can be tuned for one operating point.
Let’s not even talk about all the things in the fuel system that seem to have a shorter life with ethanol involved, particularly injectors.
However, I am quite excited about using them for CO2-neutral long-distance flights. Being able to reach any place on earth in 24h is awesome, and there is simply no battery technology that can power a practical airplane.
Mazda also have an all-electric car, the Mx-30. (Starting MSRP $33,470)
Toyota/Subaru aren't much better. Japanese carmakers seem to hope that BEVs are only a fad.
Neither make sense compared to halving our speed limits.
https://electrek.co/2022/09/12/tesla-access-all-the-batterie...
It just didn't come from dinosaurs, it's still a long hydrocarbon that burns.
The fuel in TFA game from ag-waste. So presumably it's carbon neutral on a ~1-2yr timeline.
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.
Explain why they aren’t solving the wrong problem?
2. Synthetic fuels still emit CO2, sox, nox etc. at the tailpipe
3. "Synthetic" fuels still use natural gas as the feedstock in production.
Synthetic fuel from renewable feedstock should only be used where we cannot replace ICE, for example planes.
Synthetic fuel for cars is pure heresy from the environmental point of view. We already are at the limit in the production of wood pellet for heating (the forest are suffering enormously from climate change), bio gas is using not only waste but also corn and "good" crops to be produced.
And of course, the process to convert all this biomass into a fuel is consuming a lot of energy.
Please, do not dream of everything green with synthetic fuels everywhere, this can only be part of a small part of the transition.
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?
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.
Hmmm. The fuel is hydrocarbons; so the emissions are at minimum CO2 and particulates.
It's similar to the farming industry producing incredible amounts of food just to feed cattle rather than to feed people. Not all crops grow on all land, of course, but as long as there are large scale famines in the world, I think it's immoral to dedicate so much land towards inedible foodstuffs.
We're already burning forests under the guise of "renewable fuels" that assume we've assured that the forests are allowed grow back the next 100 years even when biofuels are no longer profitable.
There are good reasons to rid ourselves from fossil fuels where we can, not just because of global warming but also because of political reasons (the oil states getting away with literal murder and a blind eye being turned towards their funding of what would become 9/11, for one). However, I fear that these plant based "alternatives" will be quickly bought up by the oil industry, touted as the future of green energy, and used to postpone greener alternatives to the internal combustion engine yet another decade.
The Porsche/Exxon syn fuel uses natural gas as it's feedstock, for instance.
I'm pretty sure the Mazda pr guy was just smart enough to omit that detail, not that they are hiding it's magical eco friendly origins.
It's still a long hydrocarbon chain that breaks down into CO2 during combustion.
This entire line of reasoning is avoided in the article, so I can only imagine it was sponsored by BP or SA.
Trucks are probably a good use case for synthetic zero or negative emission fuels.
Some kind of hydrogen/biogas generator hybrid might be viable too.
Some will become fully electric, but it's heavily dependent on the usage profile. There is a mining truck in use today that's never charged - but it's a special case where it goes uphill empty and comes back down in full load with regenerative braking.
The bar for what kind of usage makes diesel cheaper than gas over all is constantly creeping higher. Notice how a huge fraction of smaller medium duty trucks have gasoline engines these days.
You can use atmospheric carbon but it's very hard to pull it down out of the air because it's very dilute.
That's why hydrogen is such a big deal and being focused on instead. It's harder in every respect, but the base component is water, which is very easy to get.
