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.
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 CO2, 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 CO2 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 CO2 out of the atmosphere and reselling it as fuel, there might be actual demand for this technology.
Two problems:
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.
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.
We already have an effective, scalable, green(ish) way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and transform it into alcohols like ethanol.
1: Grow plants
2: Plants capture atmospheric carbon and produce sugars
3: Use microbes to ferment the sugars into alcohol
4: Distill the alcohol to remove impurities
At that point, ethanol can be used as fuel directly (it already is in some places), or it could be used as the starting point for her synthetic petrol process.
Are you referring to algae biofuels? I used to see a lot of articles about that, but I haven’t seen anything recently. Last I knew, no one had really managed to develop it into an effective process. Is there something newer that you know of?
They are referring to making ethanol or methanol. step 4.
The tricky part about ethanol is it takes energy to distill it. But the oil industry HATES ethanol. It can be made anywhere by anyone cheap, we can’t have that. Some countries in South America run on E100. Not sure why Cuba isn’t running on ethanol from sugar cane.
Ethanol and alcohol are both hygroscopic, they pull humidity from the air, so you end up with water content in your fuel. The higher the purity is, the worse the problem is. It’s fine if you’re burning it off regularly, but if it sits in your car for very long it can rust the inside of your engine block. Newer cars have better sealed fuel systems to prevent air intrusion, but older vehicles could be ruined by ethanol content in the fuel.
LOL… internet educated. See Brazil. They don’t have any of the problems that exist on the US internet.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1092181_a-brief-history-of-ethanol-in-brazil
Fuel is not stored within the engine block. It is stored between the tank and the pressurized fuel injection system. You should talk to IndyCar and tell them they are stupid for using alcohol since 1965. The level of misinformation about ethanol fuels on forums like Reddit and Lemmy are impressive, all tied to some liberal conspiracy.
In the real world, motors running on ethanol are far cleaner, there are no carbon deposits nor buildup.
The other lies include: it competes for food. 92% of corn grown in US is not even edible.