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Battery technologies grab the headlines, but hydrogen has been touted as a clean, abundant alternative fuel that literally is all around us: hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
Unfortunately, carbon waste gases are becoming increasingly common as well.
Electrofuels combine the two.
Hydrogen for fuel usually is distilled from natural gas. In contrast, “green” hydrogen doesn’t come from fossil fuels but typically is sucked out of water.
Electrofuels blend green hydrogen with carbon gas pulled from the air or from industrial waste streams to create a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels.
The mixture doesn’t rely on pumping oil or gas out of the ground; there’s more than enough carbon to harvest out of the atmosphere. Electrofuels simply recycle the carbon that’s already around us.
Also, unlike EVs, electrofuels don’t make every vehicle now on the road obsolete.
Earlier this year, the U.S. energy department granted almost $3 million to an electrofuel project that draws carbon from a fertilizer plant’s waste stack and combines it with green hydrogen to make formic acid, which can be used as a liquid replacement fuel in some engines.
Last fall, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund led a $69-million funding round for Infinium, a California electrofuels venture putting together projects in Texas and Japan and now building a facility in France that, the company says, will convert more than 300,000 tons of carbon waste gas each year into fuel for the aviation and shipping industries.
The fuels are “an instant replacement” for conventional diesel and jet fuel and emit 95 percent less pollution compared to the entire life cycle of drilling, production, and refining oil to make today’s engine fuels.
Porsche also is aboard the electrofuels bus.
It has partnered with Siemens and others to build a pilot plant in Chile that will flip the switch next year, producing 130,000 liters of electrofuels and quickly ramping up to 550 million liters by 2026— enough, the venture says, to fuel a million vehicles.
TRENDPOST: Electrofuels won’t have their own pumps at convenience stores, but are likely to become a niche member of the energy ecosystem.
Plants to produce the fuels will be located at a source of waste carbon gases, such as industrial stacks or among future plants that will exist specifically to pull carbon from the atmosphere.
That will place the fuels’ production in industrial or rural areas, making fleet vehicles—garbage trucks, box trucks, and possibly city buses—early adopters along with farm tractors, combines, and other agricultural machinery.