The new iceage

WE HEAD TO THE SOURCE TO SEE IF E-FUEL REALLY MAY BE ABLE TO SAVE THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE

- STEVE SUTCLIFFE

SO, E-FUEL; what is it, how's it made, how much does it cost, can you actually buy it right now, and is it going to save the world?

In the simplest terms e-fuel is petrol that's made entirely from clean energy (in this case wind and water) that can be used in any internal combustion engine on the planet. It requires no mining or burning of fossils to produce but actively removes CO₂ from the atmosphere during its manufacture, hence the reason Porsche refers to as a 'virtually carbon neutral' fuel. Which is nice.

It's made by splitting the hydrogen from oxygen that you get in plain old water (H₂O) using a machine called an electrolyser that's powered entirely by the wind, in this case one that's harnessed by a huge Siemens turbine down on the southernmost end of Chile, where the wind blows hard all day and, as Lionel Richie might put it, all night long.

The hydrogen that's harnessed from this process is then mixed with CO₂ that's extracted from the air by a radical new process called 'air capture technology to create e-methanol. This e-methanol then goes through a final process called MTG (methanol to gasoline) that's been developed by Exxon-Mobil at the end of which, hey presto, you get raw 93-octane fuel that can be brought up to whatever octane rating you require with final additives. And not a single fossil is set fire to during the entire process.

The resulting e-fuel can be used in anything from a 1970s F1 car on carburettors to a Porsche Panamera Turbo S to a commercial passenger jet. It really is that flexible in its potential usage but also, more crucially, that clean. In cars that emit less than about 100g/km it's closer to being carbon negative rather than carbon neutral because the CO₂ that's removed from the atmosphere during manufacture very nearly outweighs the amount of CO₂ that's emitted when it burns. So in theory that makes e-fuel a very big win indeed.