E-fuel and biofuels, who won and who lost the EU game
The agreement on the use of e-fuels after 2035 between the Commission and Germany is very popular with Porsche, Bosch, Mazda and others. Italy risks the exclusion of biofuels (in which Eni is the leader)
Over the weekend, Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Green Deal, announced the reaching of an agreement with Germany on the use of e-fuels in cars. Basically, to convince the German government to adhere to the legislation on zero-emission vehicles from 2035, the Commission has decided to review the ban on the sale of new cars with traditional engines – a ban that doesn't even convince Italy – by inserting a derogation for carbon-neutral synthetic fuels.
We have found an agreement with Germany on the future use of efuels in cars.
We will work now on getting the CO2-standards for cars regulation adopted as soon as possible, and the Commission will follow-up swiftly with the necessary legal steps to implement recital 11.
— Frans Timmermans (@TimmermansEU) March 25, 2023
WHAT ARE E-FUELS
E-fuels are synthetic fuels, from the laboratory: they are produced by combining carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere (rather than left dispersed) with green hydrogen (the one obtained from renewable electricity).
Being equivalent to regular automotive fuels, they can be fed into internal combustion engines and release CO2 when burned. However, they are considered "neutral" from an emission point of view because the CO2 they emit to the exhaust pipe is equal to that originally absorbed by the air and used for their production.
SUPPORTERS AND CRITICS
Supporters of e-fuels underline the contribution that these fuels can make to the decarbonisation of both transport that is difficult to electrify and the car fleet in circulation, eliminating the need to replace every car with an electric one: cars with internal combustion engines, in fact, will not disappear in the future. 2035, even if new ones cannot be registered.
Critics, however, point out that the production of e-fuels has a high cost and consumes large quantities of renewable energy, much more than that of a battery-powered vehicle. Furthermore, electric technologies are at a more advanced stage of development than those for e-fuels, of which large-scale production does not yet exist.
ALL THE COMPANIES (NOT ONLY GERMANS) THAT PUSH E-FUEL
The agreement on the use of e-fuels after 2035 is obviously a victory for Germany, which intends to protect its automotive industry – the sector generates 411 billion euros and employs 800,000 people – from a ban that it considers too radical in the times and in the modalities.
Among the German car manufacturers, Porsche is the one that is focusing more on e-fuels: the battery would cause an increase in the weight of its cars and could negatively affect performance (lithium-ion devices have a lower energy density than e -fuel). Porsche has invested in the first commercial e-fuel production plant, to open in Chile in 2021, which aims to produce 550 million liters of these fuels a year.
BMW has also shown interest in e-fuels, investing 12.5 million dollars in the American startup Prometheus Fuels but allocating more resources to battery-electric technologies. Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz, as well as much of the global auto industry, are instead focusing efforts on electric.
Many German companies that produce automotive components (electric vehicles contain fewer parts) have lined up on the side of e-fuels, such as Bosch, ZF and Mahle: they are part of the eFuel Alliance, a lobbying group.
Outside of Germany, one automaker particularly interested in e-fuels is Japanese Mazda.
ITALY IS DEFEATED?
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani defined the agreement between the Commission and Germany on e-fuels as “the end of the electric taboo. We are starting to talk about e-fuels, but we want the question to be extended to biofuels as well, "neutral" fuels and similar for use to e-fuels but produced from agricultural crops or organic waste.
"The game on biofuels is not lost at all", assured the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. However, Brussels seems to continue to keep them separate from e-fuels and it is not certain that it will include them in the derogation.
In Italy, it is above all Eni that produces biofuels , at the biorefineries in Venice and Gela: it is aiming for an output of 2 million tonnes a year in 2025, to be raised to 6 million within a decade.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/e-fuel-biocarburanti-italia-germania/ on Mon, 27 Mar 2023 07:55:15 +0000.