With 2035 as a clear horizon in the decarbonisation of the commercial offer in Europe, car manufacturers have to develop ranges of electric cars that gradually begin to adapt to the needs of each customer (especially in terms of price). In addition to electric cars, Porsche is the manufacturer that is most strongly committed to synthetic fuels, the so-called ‘e-fuels’, a solution that the firm sees as a complementary solution to pure electricyes Its CEO, Oliver Blume, has recently spoken about it.
The director, of German origin, is one of the architects of the great state of economic form in which the Stuttgart firm finds itself. Regarding electric mobility, Blume himself has described the Porsche Taycan as an electric car ‘on a par with the 911’. Proof of this is its sales, which exceeded the level of 40,000 units last year, and which gives the company wings to continue advancing in this regard.
Porsche expects 80% of its sales by 2030 to come from electric cars, but it also expects synthetic fuel to weigh heavily in its plans for the future, stating that it sees it as ‘a complementary solution’ to electric cars. by batteries. In fact, the EU has left open the possibility of this type of fuel beyond 2035 as long as they do not release emissions into the atmosphere.
In addition to the latter, it is also important that wherever this type of fuel is produced, renewable energies abound, so that the extra energy needed to produce synthetic fuels with respect to other types of fuels and energy is irrelevant. In this sense, Porsche is already working, and it already has a pilot project underway in an e-fuels production plant in Chile in which wind gusts of up to 120 kilometers per hour are recurrently recorded.
Starting this year, the pilot plant is expected to produce some 130,000 liters of e-fuels year. Porsche will acquire this volume in its entirety and will initially allocate it, above all, to its use in competition. In the future, Porsche plans to use these synthetic fuels in its models with a combustion engine, including classics.
And it is that, one of the advantages of this type of fuels is that they will be valid for automobiles manufactured to use traditional fuels. In fact, Porsche has already tested its own ‘e-fuel’ with non-Porsche drivers in the first dynamic tests of the Porsche Cayman GT4 RS.
In addition to declaring that he sees it as a technology intended to complement pure electrics, Blume has also said how much he thinks each liter of synthetic fuel will cost in the future.
“This will depend on the level of production in the future. If it is done on an industrial scale, it will be possible to reach a price of less than 2 dollars per liter. The important thing is that synthetic fuels are manufactured in a sustainable way and in parts of the world where renewable energy abounds, in such a way that the extra input of energy for production is irrelevant. The e-fuels Produced from water and carbon dioxide extracted from the air, with application for cars, planes and ships, they have the advantage over pure hydrogen that they can be transported more easily”.
Currently, thinking of a price of 2 euros per liter of fuel as a long-term solution does not seem like a bad idea at all, especially considering that In many areas of Spain, the price of fuel already far exceeds the barrier of two euros.
