Future Fuel: Porsche Sponsors Major eFuel Initiative—at $45 a Gallon

I often cover brand-new technology that promises to make motoring safer, cleaner, more convenient, or somehow better in the future. As I noted in this July 2019 recap of 37 years of Technologue columns (many predating my tenure withMotorTrend), the percentage of Technologue subjects that had by then reached production was a rather disappointing 36. So at this point, permit me to thank Porsche for helping bring a topic I've frequently covered to fruition: eFuel from direct air carbon capture.

These June 2008 and January 2012 columns both looked forward to a day when we might pull CO2 directly out of the sky and turn it into fuel. In August 2018 I reported about a company poised to begin producing just such an e-fuel from direct carbon capture. It was producing two barrels of fuel per day back then, and its planned larger facility in west Texas seems stalled in the planning stages.

But way down on South America's windy southern tip, just north of Punta Arenas, Chile, the Haru Oni plant has recently broken ground, and this year is planned to produce enough green hydrogen and scrub sufficient CO2 from the atmosphere to produce almost 200,000 gallons of green methanol. A portion of this will be subsequently converted into roughly 34,000 gallons of green gasoline—all of which will be shipped to Porsche for use in motorsports.

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In the Magallanes region of Chile, strong williwaw winds power extreme low-pressure systems created by the meeting of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The wind power consistently available there is roughly four times greater than any place on the European continent, which is one reason the plant is in Chile and not in Europe.

The project is a joint effort between HIF (Highly Innovative Fuels), Siemens Energy, ExxonMobil, and the Chilean oil and gas companies ENAP and Empresas Gasco. Once it reaches full commercial capacity in 2026, the plant will be able to produce 1 million tons of green methanol per year, of which a portion will be upconverted to 145 million gallons of gasoline.

In the first year, a 3.4-megawatt Siemens Gamesa wind turbine will power a Siemens Silyzer 200 proton-exchange membrane to produce green hydrogen from water via electrolysis at 65 percent efficiency. Commercialization will up the wind power to 2.5 gigawatts (scaling up the electrolysis accordingly), and further efficiency improvements are expected within the next five years.

A Global Thermostats system extracts CO2 from the air using an amine-based sorbent coating on a porous ceramic honeycomb matrix. CO2 is periodically "washed off" by low-temperature steam to yield 98 percent pure CO2. Green methanol is then formed by running the hydrogen and CO2 through a Johnson Matthey copper-zinc catalyst. Finally, the methanol is vaporized, superheated, and fed to a fluid-bed reactor where an ExxonMobil catalyst helps convert it to gasoline, with water as a byproduct. (This system seems simpler than the one in my October 2018 column.)

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The additives and blending required to ensure eFuel can serve as a "drop-in" replacement for crude-based gasoline lowers its carbon intensity figure to around 10, not zero. That still means burning it results in 90 percent less net carbon than standard gasoline, with identical performance properties.

What does it cost? Porsche pegs the initial price at 10 euros per liter ($44.73 per gallon as of this writing!) but expects efficiencies of scale and technology to reduce that to $7.57/gallon by 2026. The automaker initially plans to run its race cars on eFuel in the Mobil 1 Porsche Supercup F1 support series but may eventually use it to fill new road cars at the factory as well as the vehicles used at Porsche Experience Centers. The eMethanol produced in the same plant might someday power the ships that deliver new Porsches. But the end game is to ensure there's a carbon-neutral fuel that can power the 70 percent of all Porsches ever built that are still on the road long after the new-car fleet is fully electrified.

Update April 6, 2022:In a further commitment to this carbon-neutral fuel, Porsche has invested $75-million into HIF Global for a 12.5 percent stake into the Chilean company. Porsche's investment is accompanied by other endowments from financial institutions and companies such as EIG, Baker Hughes Company, Gemstone Investments, and majority shareholder, Andes Mining and Energy (AME).

These investments will not only be used to produce the eFuel in Chile, but also build additional facilities in the U.S. and Australia. "We see ourselves as pioneers in eFuels and want to drive the technology. This is one building block in our clear, overall sustainability strategy," said Michael Steiner, Member of the Executive Board for Research and Development at Porsche AG.

Update December 20, 2022:Today Chilean Energy Minister Diego Pardow officially opened the Haru Oni pilot eFuels production plant in Punta Arenas, Chile, thereby holding to the timing projected when we first covered this story during the plant's ground-breaking. To mark the occasion, Mr. Pardow ceremonially fueled a Porsche 911 with some of the first synthetic fuel to be produced at the plant. Executive Board members Barbara Frenkel and Michael Steiner were also on hand, reconfirming plans to scale up in phases to 14.5 million gallons of eFuel by the middle of this decade, and to 145 million gallons two years after hitting that mark. Porsche will be the sole consumer of the pilot-phase fuels, but as the plant scales to those larger production volumes, HIF Global will become the primary customer. Steiner pointed out that Formula One has announced a switch to 100-percent eFuel by 2026, so there's one more potential customer.

As for the cost, Steiner estimates that once the plant reaches the higher production volumes, the production cost of eGasoline could approach $7.57/gallon, owing to the abundant, inexpensive wind energy available in the Magellanes region. That's cost, not price, but it's down considerably from the estimated $44.73/gallon Porsche spent for the fuel that went into the 911 today.

Porsche's has invested more than $100 million in eFuels production to date, and Frenkel has advocated use of eMethanol as a carbon-neutral global hydrocarbon feedstock that can be easily transported using the same infrastructure that distributes fossil-based crude oil, and refined locally into whatever is needed. The eFuel dispensed into the 911 today was entirely produced at the plant in Chile, but in converting CO2 and hydrogen into a transportable liquid hydrocarbon, eMethanol is the first fuel to come out of the process and so it may one day prove most economical to ship that product globally for local refinement. Steiner added that shipping has a very low percentage impact in the overall carbon footprint of the fuel, so long as the eventual refinement is also carried out using renewable energy. But there are efficiencies to be had by co-locating the eMethanol and eGasoline refinement steps, as many of the processes are exothermic, and the heat released can be used to, for instance, boil off excess water from the initial methanol output.