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I recently learned about eFuels[1]. Specifically that Porshe has invested in an eFuels plant in Chile[2]. The curious thing about this is that it's about creati
by dom96 4y ago
I recently learned about eFuels[1]. Specifically that Porshe has invested in an eFuels plant in Chile[2]. The curious thing about this is that it's about creating traditional fuel out of captured carbon dioxide. I'm guessing Toyota's CEO thinks that something like this may become mainstream rather than all-electric.
I think it's possible, especially if the resources necessary to build good car batteries become too scarce. Though I am concerned that even though eFuels are "carbon neutral", they will still bring pollution to large urban areas. Something that electric vehicles are clearly much better at.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofuel
2 - https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2022/company/porsche-highly-innovative-fuels-hif-opening-efuels-pilot-plant-haru-oni-chile-synthetic-fuels-30732.html https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2022/company/porsche-highly-...
- jeffbee 4y agoThe problem with the efuel story is scale. The ultimate claimed future capacity of that Chile plant is only enough to fuel one single commercial aircraft. It’s just way too much infrastructure for the output.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago20 years ago, solar panels and electric cars also had "scale" problems. Those turned out not to be problems.
- jeffbee 4y agoNo, even forty years ago it was clear that you could power the entire USA from a negligible sacrifice of southwestern territory to solar power. Your analogy doesn’t work.
- prottog 4y agoYou could, in a world of spherical cows. We could just as easily say synthetic fuels could power the entire USA if we just scaled it up.
- jeffbee 4y agoMy point is you can’t make that argument. It’s obviously false. You would need millions of the facility in the press release to even make a dent in global liquid fuel supply. You would cover the earth with windmills before you finished the job.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoOn the contrary, if you looked at solar panels in the 1990s, you would think that there would be flying cars before you could scale manufacturing up to fill a good chunk of the southwest US. Only later did people actually make silicon solar panels that could be cheap enough, and it took longer to make them with good enough yield to actually deploy them in large quantity. This technology doesn't seem to have many known scaling limits yet, just processes which haven't been well-researched, so there's no need to dismiss it early.
- HWR_14 4y agoI mean, technology tends to get smaller, cheaper and more efficient over time. It's like objecting to the first computers because they took up a giant room, were heavy and could only do 3rd grade math. They'll never go anywhere.
- jeffbee 4y agoConversion of atmospheric CO2 to liquid fuels isn’t ever going to get more efficient. It’s limited by physics. And the claimed future capacity of that plant already bakes in substantially optimistic assumptions about benefits of scale. Its current capacity is 100x smaller.
- lodovic 4y agoIf the technology can be miniaturized and applied directly to a car, it would generate its own fuel. Combined with an electromotor/batteries as a hybrid engine, this could be an extremely efficient way to drive.