Synthetic fuel running on empty already
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Hey,
I know. I too am shocked to find myself writing an edition of Car Science not the other newsletter but there’s been a few interesting stories recently that I can’t really find a way to stitch together into a pitch. They do add up to a bunch of curious developments in the increasingly mis-sold-looking case of a technology that maybe turns out not to deliver anything like what it said it could, at gigantic energy costs.
Yes, like cryptocurrency, NFTS, AI and almost anything else that’s become a suddenly popular race car sticker craze in the past five years, synthetic fuel may not be all its refined to be. That won’t shock long term subscribers to Car Science; the maths, at the end of the day, does not make any sense.
Here’s how it works: you capture carbon out of the air (an extremely energy intense process) and then crack hydrogen from water using even more energy. Then you combine the two into methanol, which is another whack to the leccy meter and finally you refine your hydrocarbon chain into a recognisable fuel. Chemically, nothing is different from your manufactured fuel than from something refined from crude oil - the difference is in the amount of energy required for the process, since with fossil fuels all of that had been put in by the earth and gravity over millions of years whereas you’re trying to do all that in machines.
An F1 power unit has more than 50% efficiency in terms of extracting the energy from its fuel, once you take into account the hybrid system. That means, at best, in the highest-tech cars in the world, a bit more than half of the energy you imbued your synthetic fuel with is actually usable. And you’ve put more than 100% of the energy it’s possible to extract out of it into making it. This is a BrewDog founder level transaction, especially when you consider 100% of the carbon you had to capture to make it has now gone right back into the atmosphere.
Car companies were going absolutely hell for leather over synthetic fuel a little while back, as was F1. When I still wrote a lot of coverage of the sport in 2021/22 I was sort of disappointed-but-not-surprised to realise I was one of the few cynical voices about it, especially some of the straight-up PR claims like “carbon neutral fuel” - if you ignore all the carbon needed to build and run a factory and move the fuel around and even then consider it somehow worth re-releasing everything you captured then err, maybe. But it’s a highly qualified definition of those words.
My friend Stuart (F1 youtuber Chainbear) asked me about synthetic fuel during an extremely stressful moment in my life when I was absolutely desperate for any sort of mental distraction. So after I’d explained the rough principles my brain started looking for more details like: what did happen with Porsche’s Haru Oni mega-factory for synthetic fuels and what’s Paddy Lowe up to now.
Then my housemate made the poor decision to send me Prometheus Fuels’ release about how they’d completely rewritten the synthetic fuel rulebook, it turns out F1 teams are worried about having to pay ten to fifteen times as much per litre of fuel next year and at the end of the day, I’m just one woman who’s fairly interested in all this stuff still so it seemed like time to send a newsletter.
So: what’s going on in Haru Oni? You know, the gigantic factory Porsche, HIF and Siemens were building to make checks notes 14.5 million gallons (US) of clean-energy-based synthetic fuel by err, last year. HIF’s current figures say it’s at 130,000 litres, which is 34,342 US gallons. What percentage of that was taken up by the Porsche Supercup season I’ll not hazard a guess at.
Not that 130,000 litres is nothing, obviously. Synthetic fuel isn’t made-up technology. But it is proving to be much harder and much worse value than it maybe looked when, say, the Volkswagen Group and Formula 1 were both lobbying (F1 quite shamelessly on behalf of oil partners) the EU to allow it as a loophole for future combustion cars.
One of the sticking points is the Direct Air Capture technology for sequestering that carbon. If you’re actually going to make a carbon-neutral or even semi-green fuel then you need to capture more than what will be used in the fuel and subsequently re-released, in order to compensate for what’s used in production but DAC is fantastically energy-demanding in and of itself. Even though the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is much higher than it should be it’s still 0.0427%, which means you’ve got to filter a hell of a lot of other stuff to get hold of it. Which means huffing volumes upon volumes of air through your filter system.
Porsche and the Haru Oni site have struggled to find a DAC partner. It looks as though they now have a fairly large-scale test project set to go online later this year, developed with Porsche despite the manufacturer having stepped back from operational involvement with the facility.
Is there anything that can be done about the inefficiency of this step? Well, yeah - you can use carbon captured as industrial runoff but that doesn’t carry the same envirowashing clout as saying it’s been captured from the air. Despite Pat Symonds (F1’s chief evangelist for synthetic fuels) telling media that a photosynthesis-based process from algae could be viable back in 2023, he seems to have confused bio and synthetic fuels; the algae can then be processed into various types of biofuel but to my knowledge there’s no process for just farming the carbon it sequesters in its own cells.
Artificial leaves have some potential but are usually creating synthetic gas, rather than purely collecting carbon. Except they’re not very efficient or scaleable, either, so it’s not an easy hack to skip a step.
Anyway, whatever, where was I? Oh yeah, DAC is such a problem because of how much work it needs to do to make up for the other processes. Even if you’re running your site on clean energy you’re going to need a hell of a lot of it. A lot of this is because almost everyone is still using the Fischer-Tropsch process for their synthetic fuel.
It’s a 100-year-old way of turning methanol into syngas and then cracking it into liquid hydrocarbons. It works and you can make them to order via it - whether you want long-chain jet fuels or something for a classic car. But it’s not very efficient and reactors operate around 300C, which isn’t a plasma arc but is a long, long way off ambient.
Prometheus, those guys I mentioned earlier, say they’ve sorted that. Instead of using Fischer-Tropsch they’re using a method they’ve been a bit secretive about but well, I am just a woman who knows a reasonable amount about all this so I spent a normal amount of time deep down the back of the internet.
In 2018 Rob McGinnis, now CEO of Prometheus, was CEO of Mattershift - a company dedicated to making carbon nanotube membranes that processed molecules. The ol’ high-tech hydrocarbon rearrangers, shall we say. Even then he was saying that they had the capacity to use them for competitively priced synthetic fuel, maybe even cheaper than fossil fuels.
By 2022 there was a basic prototype that, in a live demonstration, could concentrate alcohols into a presumably methanol-based fuel capable of being used in an adapted motorcycle. Come October of that year they’d used funding wisely enough to have a commercial-scale version of their Faraday Reactor.
They claim to have a very low-cost way of doing DAC, which seems to basically be using renewable power for it. They’ve got plenty of enthusiastic words about it but it’s not, itself, novel technology. That’s fine, the actual cost-saving is in using much lower amounts of energy for their processes to actually make the fuel; if, as they say, they really can produce fuel at ambient pressure and temperature, with a process that doesn’t require separate methanol production, then there are efficiencies.
Do I really believe it will ever be as cheap as fossil fuel? Not really. And part of that’s because, morally and environmentally, hydrocarbon fuel should never be as cheap as it’s been ever again. Prometheus clearly have a valid technology but the fact they’re not having their arms bitten off for it by, say, Aramco or BP or Shell or ExxonMobil or any of these other tiny companies with very little resources says either that petrochemical giants remain arrogant about their own abilities or that the Prometheus technology isn’t quite the threat it sounds like.
Prometheus are one of the only places sounding excited about it currently, though. The sheer scale of the challenge seems to be being realised elsewhere - Porsche were the major advocate of synthetic fuels, so them pulling back from Haru Oni after making such a gigantic fanfare about it is a sign of how the mood on synthetic fuels has changed.
Anyway, there you go, a roundup of Some Things That Have Been Happening With Synthetic Fuel Lately. Who knows when I’ll next be moved to write one of these but if you do have stuff you’d like to know about let me know.
Hazel
x
ps: while I was deep in the source I found this very interesting article for a process that makes syngas and carbon nanotubes at the same time, from biogas. I will readily admit this is above my science grade in terms of working out if it’s actually useful but, well, good to know.