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.
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.
But if a bit of e-fuel means you can prevent the waste of, say, an entire car instead of recycling the car…
At some point, there’s got to be a point where the inefficiency of producing and burning ‘e-fuel’ is less than the inefficiency of prematurely scrapping existing internal combustion engines and infrastructure. After all, scrapping and replacing vehicles comes with its own energy costs, as well as other environmental concerns.
I understand the argument, but I see two big reasons for why it’s not valid here. First, e-fuel production and infrastructure needs to be constructed as well. So your calculation needs to consider the entire cost/inefficiency of constructing the entire e-fuel econonomy in the first place.
Second, I can’t imagine existing cars outlasting humanities dependency on fossil fuels for electricity. Cars last what, 20-30 years? I bet humanity is not going to replace all fossil fuel electricity production with green one within the next 100 years. Like I said previously, as long as you burn fossils for electricity, producing e-fuels would only increase carbon emissions, not reduce them.
But yes, when it comes to efficient, it’s best to keep using existing things (barring exceptions where the original thing was too inefficient/dangerous/whatever). That includes not only cars, but also factories, etc. So technically combustion cars should probably still be built for a few decades, until existing factories are too outdated or have reached the end of their life. The same is true for fuel production though - use existing fuel production and don’t invest in e-fuels.
With all of that out of the way, as far as I’m concerned scrapping most of the existing passenger car, regardless of whether it’s combustion or electric, is a good thing. They and their infrastructure take up way too much space, energy and material, not to forget the noise, the smell, the danger, …