Chemical engineer here: e-fuel will NEVER cost around €2 per liter to manufacture. My calculation comes to around €10/l at scale of plants of around 10 kt yearly throughput rate, and possibly down to €7/l at scales 10 to 50 times larger because of economies of scale. The size of the plant is limited upward by the renewable power that can be produced within a reasonable distance for dedicated power lines. SO, e-fuels plants will NOT reach the size of present days oil refineries. Be also aware that these prices are based on a cost per kWh of renewable power that cannot be obtained anywhere close to population centers, but halfway around the globe from them. So, the cost of shipping the e-fuel is included in those costs. But then, production costs is to be compared to the cost of gasoline or diesel at the gate of a refinery, which means roughly €0,70-1 per liter, depending on oil price. They are therefore approximately 10x more expensive to manufacture. But it is not finished. You have to distribute those e-fuels. That will cost not a lot more, but a bit more than is presently the case for gasoline or diesel. The reason is that the tank and pump system to deliver fuel to cars will be the same as for any other fuel quality, but the volume sold much less. So, let's say around €0,20/l for the distribution margin. Then taxes. In Europe, automotive fuels are basically taxed in two ways: 1) a petrol product tax which is supposed to pay for road infrastructure, and 2) VAT, at 20% rate. 1) varies with countries, but let's say €0,70/l as a European average... there is no reason it should be different for e-fuels. So, let's be optimistic and take my lowest estimation for the cost of production and transport: - e-fuel production and transport to a European harbor: €7/l - Distribution margin: €0,20/l - Fuel tax: €0,70/l Total cost before VAT: €7,90/l + VAT (20% rate... yes, including on the fuel tax): €1,58/l Total cost to the motorist: ca. €9,50/l ($40/USG!!!) Is ANYONE (save a rich classic car collector) ready to pay that much for the pleasure and privilege to drive a still polluting car? It is not a great risk to say that e-fuels will, at best, stay a small niche market for road transportation (they just might find a place for long-range air transport), hence their price will likely be HIGHER than above calculated! N.B 1.: The price to recharge an EV in my country of residence (France) is the equivalent of a liter of gasoline at ca. €0,25. In my home country (Switzerland), it would rather be around 3 times as much...but still 10 TIMES less than using e-fuel! N.B. 2: e-fueled cars will be progressively banned from city centers, just like fossil fueled ones, because the problem of air pollution in dense traffic areas is NOT an issue of CO2, but of NOx and particulates, on which e-fuels are just as bad as fossil fuels. It would be a shame to have a beautiful e-fueled Porsche 911 turbo... and not be allowed to drive it to the opera or the concert, wouldn't it?! Conclusion: the above is the difference between an honest estimation from someone "skilled-in-the-art", and numbers coming from a propaganda outlet.
Hi guys, please explain the electricity cost relation to the eFuels. Which is the most energy demanding process and how much energy per litre is needed. Keep the good work! Cheers!
Wow, those seem like wildly optimistic numbers. If the ramp up of eFuels can happen *really* quickly (Exxon's 550M liters is still tiny) then these highly polluting solutions may continue for years to come. It will be interesting to see advances is this technology vs. battery tech.
They need to hustle and get it out to market. I’m looking forward to the next generation of efuels that would allow new engine designs to benefit from the higher octanes possible. EV has its place but it’s not a magic bullet, if anything it’s not even a bullet when you consider the damage cobalt mining does to Africa and the monopolisation of battery manufacture in China. We cannot be held hostage to China and their supply chains.
This is great stuff - I wish the efuels alliance every success, even a casual glance at this technology reveals its potential, alas vested interests and Green zealotry seems Hell bent on stifling the contribution efuels could make
@@vonryansexpress i dont think you understand what efficient means. There is no 100% conversion, so by that definition, everything is, but if you compare batteries to gas, you're massively more efficient. Same applies to pollution. Not only does the production of gas pollute and require a lot of energy with a conversion of maybe 40%, you keep doing it all along the chain over and over and over again, so that you not only pollute constantly, you effectively end up in single digits efficiency. Whereas with batteries you convert 80% once from whatever the source is, and the production has the initial pollution etc, and then thats it until the end of the battery life. 2 years in operation, or 20-50k miles, you've offset the inital amount of pollution...
@@fetB You are making "efficiency" the only criteria - you need to draw yourself away from narrow focus intolerance a take a look at the big picture - this issue is too important to be bogged down in hysterical bigotry - there is no time to indulge in such things. . . These fuels have an important role to play if we are to avoid Carbon emission created Global warming . .
The high cost of E-Fuels is due to the INCREDIBLY inefficient process for producing them. Scaling that process won’t actually make it cheaper. There is a finite amount of wind power. Once you approach that limit you will hit a hard ceiling.
It depends on the cost of wind/solar electricity, and the efficiency of the conversion process. It’s a straightforward computation after that. The best promise I’ve seen is from Prometheus Fuels, who are promising close to 50% efficiency for making synthetic gasoline and jet fuel. And their system is basically room temperature, so it doesn’t need distillation or other high temperature, high pressure processes. (Their “secret sauce” is basically a nanotube reverse osmosis filter that separates ethanol from water. They make the ethanol/water from carbonic acid (carbonated water, which can be made on the spot with a fan/waterfall), using a process developed by the US Dept of Energy. So no distillation or pressures needed.) Because they can shut down at night without production cost except for lost time, they can run on pure solar, which can be had for 2c/kWh in sunny climates today. There are about 35kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline. If they can produce synthetic gasoline at scale, at 50% efficiency on 2c solar, that’s about $1.40/gallon in energy cost. Light sweet crude is, at this moment, $92/bbl, 42 gallons to a barrel, so a gallon of crude oil is over $2 right now, BEFORE being refined. A barrel of oil, refined, produces about 30 gallons of actual fuel (2/3 gasoline, 1/3 diesel and fuel oil). So the wholesale cost, today, of a gallon of gasoline is a bit over $3. This is in the US; prices are considerably higher in Europe and most of Asia. That $3/gallon is a price target. If anyone can make synthetic e-fuels for less than that, fossil fuel is DEAD. Why would anyone pay for dirty oil when they can run clean sunshine in the same machine for less money? The cost of wind and solar are both below $3c/kWh today for new utility-grade systems. So if someone can hit even 33% efficiency, that’s 100kWh for a gallon of synthetic gasoline. Price parity. But even before parity is achieved, there’s a HUGE potential market. A lot of people, and a lot of businesses, would pay a substantial premium for clean fuel. I would happily pay $5/gallon to turn my 13 year old Subaru into something as clean as a Tesla. A lot of people would. E-fuels are inevitable. The cost is just too powerful.
@@davestagner nothing of what you said is remotely close to reality. The process to convert the water into hydrogen takes and incredible amount of energy. It then takes a whole lot more energy to extract the carbon from the air. Then it takes even more energy to make the fuel, transport the fuel, and then burn the fuel. That entire process is laughably inefficient.
@@LearningFast You’re assuming brute force approach. I mean, maybe you’re right. Maybe Prometheus has just scammed over $50M from the likes of BMW, Maersk, and American Airlines to start a factory to build machines that don’t actually work. Or maybe, just maybe, all those conservative old companies made them demonstrate feasibility first, and know what they’re doing? But as for brute force… they don’t use it. You don’t have to separate the hydrogen from the water, or the carbon from the air. They’re using a catalyst process developed by the DoE that converts carbonated water into ethanol. Carbonated water is easy and cheap to make… basically, just make a waterfall, and use a fan to blow air through it. CO2 dissolves into the water. Fundamentally it’s no different from the little gas bubbles in your ice cube. The hard part isn’t converting CO2 + water into a fuel (ethanol) - it’s separating the ethanol from the water afterward. Historically, that’s distillation, and it’s inefficient. But by using reverse osmosis, Prometheus made it low energy, low pressure, room temperature, and thus cheap. Converting ethanol into gasoline and other such fuels is just a matter of wringing H20 molecules out of it to shorten the chain. That’s done using a zeolite catalyst, technology that has been around for decades, and again, not “laughably inefficient”. Don’t assume the brute force methods you understand from high school chemistry are the ONLY way to reassemble CO2 + H2O into hydrocarbons.
@@LearningFast But hey, let’s assume you’re right. Let’s say fuel synthesis is “laughably inefficient”… say, 10% efficiency. So it would take 350kWh to generate a gallon of gas. At 2c/kWh, that’s still only $7. That’s a bit more than double what it currently costs to make gasoline from oil in the US, and unlike fossil gasoline, it’s carbon neutral. And fwiw, right now, gasoline in Germany is $7/gallon. Remember this conversation in ten years, ok?
@@LearningFast Just out of curiosity, since you claimed that making hydrogen via electrolysis “takes an incredible amount of energy”, I looked it up. Current best industrial processes have about 70-80% conversion efficiency - it takes 50-55kWh of electricity to make 1kg of hydrogen, which has about 40kWh of energy. Huh. Googling assumptions is weird that way.
We need this to happen. No way can the world go totally to electric vehicles. Too many problems with going Electric. Weak infrastructure and too many issues with electric cars. All the gas stations are in place to handle eFuel. The cars that you all in right now will handle eFuel without any altering. Thank you for creating this product!
We dont. The world can go fully (though it doesnt actually need to). Problem is just that'll be less profitable for the few gas suppliers, but their time was up long ago. There arent many problems with electric cars, especially not technologically. Infastructure is there, but not only do gas stations make their money with groceries, the infrastructure is basically there for electricity. In fact, its even better because you can generate electricity yourself, which is especially great for rural areas. And sure, cars dont need much altering, doesnt make them not horribly inefficient and polluting, which only drastically gets worse, they're maintenance prone, and at the end of the day, you have nothing left except some metal ,unlike an EV, which can be repurposed in many ways and is even at EOL, wort ha few thousand bucks
