Porsche to race on $45/gallon eFuel from direct air carbon capture.

Technologue

- Frank Markus

Most months I use this space to explore some brand-new technology that promises to make motoring safer, cleaner, more convenient, or somehow better in the future. As I noted in my online September 2019 recap of 37 years of “Technologie” columns (many predating my tenure here), the percentage of subjects that had by then reached production was a rather disappointing 36. So this month, permit me to thank Porsche for helping bring a topic I’ve frequently covered to fruition: eFuel from direct air carbon capture.

My July 2008 and March 2012 columns both looked forward to a day when we might pull CO 2 directly out of the sky and turn it into fuel. In October 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.