Mazda has tested a synthetic fuel in an unmodified MX5 on a 1000-mile road trip

https://wkk.usa.mybluehost.me/mazda-just-proved-that-synthetic-fuels-could-be-the-future/

111 197 4 years ago

wkk.usa.mybluehost.me

cuteboy19• 4 years ago

I think heavy duty trucks and such will still work on gasoline even in an EV future. So why don't these companies try to solve that problem in a carbon neutral way?

bioemerl• 4 years ago

It's just hard to manufacture gas in a efficient way. It's a really complex and hard to make molecule and the most abundant source of ingredients for it is the carbon in the ground.

You can use atmospheric carbon but it's very hard to pull it down out of the air because it's very dilute.

That's why hydrogen is such a big deal and being focused on instead. It's harder in every respect, but the base component is water, which is very easy to get.

theshrike7910• 4 years ago

Heavy duty vehicles will move to either diesel/biogas hybrids (they can replace ~30% of the diesel with gas nowadays without any major engine mods) or to full CBG with combustion engines. Farms can produce their own CBG with relatively minor investment, basically fueling all work vehicles with cow farts =)

Some kind of hydrogen/biogas generator hybrid might be viable too.

Some will become fully electric, but it's heavily dependent on the usage profile. There is a mining truck in use today that's never charged - but it's a special case where it goes uphill empty and comes back down in full load with regenerative braking.

aitchnyu• 4 years ago

Having trouble parsing this, does this mean there is a liquid fuel thats diesel+cow farts or will diesel engines incorporate compressed biogas injection?

dsfyu404ed5• 4 years ago

Diesel will slowly go away because of the ever tightening emissions noose. It's just getting harder and harder to have something that's both compliant and has a lifetime TCO that's lower than equivalent gasoline engines that can more easily meet their (more stringent) emissions requirements.

The bar for what kind of usage makes diesel cheaper than gas over all is constantly creeping higher. Notice how a huge fraction of smaller medium duty trucks have gasoline engines these days.

andrepd• 4 years ago

Long haul is better served by rail, and EV trucks work perfectly well for short haul. I don't necessarily see that that is the case.

mrcwinn• 4 years ago

I support anything that keeps the wonderful Miata just as it is. (Okay, fine. I more so support anything that keeps the earth healthy and sustainable.)

jeromenerf• 4 years ago

Yes and yes. A simple naturally aspirated engine takes bio-ethanol/e85 just fine, though the benefits seem limited to fewer fine particles, with comparable carbon emissions but a much larger agro impact.

PaulHoule5• 4 years ago

There is no surprise that synthetic fuels work. They worked for the nazis in the 1940s and they still produce them in South Africa, Qatar and other places. In fact in a lot of ways they are better than today’s gasolines because they have a low aromatic and olefin content.

The question revolve around affordability and sustainability. Most of the interest was driven by fears we would be running out of oil, now it is driven by fears that we won’t run out of oil.

theshrike7910• 4 years ago

Current synthetic fuels cost around 10€/litre, which comes to around $37/gallon.

Not really viable for day to day use yet.

teekert• 4 years ago

I live in the Netherlands and we're almost there! ;)

No not really but, when it peaked I saw 2.40 eur/litre (9.71$/gallon, now down to 1.80 eur/litre) in places... Of course, much of that is taxes, but hey, this stuff would receive a lot of subsidies.

Fwiw, I once (4 years ago or so?) spoke to someone from an ICE conference (a parallel conference to my breast cancer conference) who explained that ICE's can be made 100% clean (just output CO2 and H2O) and 100% circular (take all that emitted CO2 out of the air again), it's just an economic consideration, technologically we are there (I guess that is true for many if not most environment related technologies, we just never take environmental damage along in the price of products, in a way we make them artificially cheap).

twawaaay• 4 years ago

Not viable yet.

But with greater adoption and more focus the prices are bound to fall.

And the prices of alternatives will be rising, both electricity and hydrocarbon fuels.

Also EVs seem to not be the answer to everything. If you live in a colder climate, out of grid or you need to drive long distances, it is not clear when on whether EVs will become practical for you.

PaulHoule5• 4 years ago

Qatar claims their Methanol-to-Gasoline based factory is profitable at a world price of $40 a barrel based on natural gas as a feed stock.

What people are hoping for today is to get CO₂ from the atmosphere and hydrogen from H₂O with electricity from solar, wind or nuclear. (Though w/ nuclear you might use thermochemical hydrogen if you can get the temperature up)

The best use case for that I've seen is that the US Navy would like to synthesize jet fuel on aircraft carriers so they don't have to slow down to take on fuel from a tanker -- delivering fuel to an aircraft carrier has to cost more than it costs at your local gas station.

Also I think there is more interest in synthetic fuel for airplanes than cars. That Mazda could almost as easily have been run on ethanol, methanol or maybe even butanol. Even methane isn't that hard. Diesel engines can be run on Dimethyl Ether. Single-entity fuels are more efficient to make than synthetic fuels based on long-chain hydrocarbons.

Aviation, on the other hand, is a place where innovation goes to die, where airlines struggle to replace obsolete electronics, where the #1 and #2 aircraft in the world were designed in 1967 and 1982, etc. (... it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car based on a 1982 design!)

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

That depends.

What is the cost of the environmental damage from traditionals?

What is the real cost of the military used to guarantee the delivery of traditionals?

That is the opportunity cost of that same military expense?

Oil refineries, they have a cost.

What happens to the cost of synthetics as production volume increases?

Etc.

We need to consider the full cost landscape, not simply gallon v gallon.

zirgs• 4 years ago

Yeah, because current fuel prices - especially in countries like the USA are fake.

i_am_proteus• 4 years ago

Yes, and: the question revolves around total financial and material capital needed to transition away from fossil fuels.

Synthetic fuels are potentially valuable because they allow existing capital assets (internal combustion engines and the industry that produces them, fuel distribution infrastructure) to continue to be used.

I am glad to see research into them continue- it's difficult to predict what will scale well economically in five or ten or thirty years.

PaulHoule5• 4 years ago

The Fischer-Trospch process has a stupendously high capital cost because, even though cheap catalysts work, chemical reactions that build up larger molecules (that can proceed explosively under some conditions) compete with chemical reactions that break molecules down and have to be balanced on a knife edge to get hydrocarbons of the right length.

For any normal industrial process people would be really delighted that they could use iron as a catalyst but the economics of FT are so bad they've scoured the periodic table for something better and not had much improvement.

mfer2• 4 years ago

The cost to transition away from fossil fuels isn’t really talked about much.

For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.

themitigating3• 4 years ago

Won't engines have to be modified and reprogrammed?

mrtksn• 4 years ago

Well, it's kind of obvious that the supplies of oil aren't infinite, isn't it? Is there even a theory that the oil is infinite? The peak oil is about timing and and cost, maybe it didn't happen according to the predictions but it will definitely happen. Besides the environmental concerns it also seems wasteful to burn away the stuff that is used for so many more things.

The synthetic stuff is interesting because it may actually be practically infinite thanks to the fusion reactor in the skies. That is because storing the energy from wind and solar in form of chemical energy solves the storage problem of the renewables. If extracting energy from that storage without polluting the environment becomes viable it can be huge.

krona• 4 years ago

Is there even a theory that the oil is infinite?

Not quite infinite, but renewable: https://edu.rsc.org/news/treasure-from-the-earths-mantle/202...

enkid2• 4 years ago

The proven oil reserves have steadily increased for the last decade, even as consumption has increased. This means that we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it. The Earth obviously can't have infinite oil, but we don't know how long until we run out, and it's likely well over fifty years from now.

kryptiskt• 4 years ago

There is such a theory, Thomas Gold thought that hydrocarbons came from underneath and then was processed by the metabolism of bacteria living far beneath the surface. He later wrote a book about the theory called "The Deep Hot Biosphere". He turned out to have been right about deep life at least.

Here is a retrospective: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502609/

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

There's probably as much combustible matetial as there's oxygen to burn it. If we burn too much, it will be difficult to breathe.

vpribish• 4 years ago

oil supplies are so vast that they are practically infinite : we must stop using it because of the emissions. peak oil has always been junk science and clickbait news.

synthetic hydrocarbons as energy storage is interesting, but all about the economics.

criley22• 4 years ago

I think it's more about finding an offramp for motorsports and classic cars (and some rural machinery) that are against electrification for a variety of reasons (both legitimate and illegitimate).

I don't think there is anyone at all that thinks turning agricultural waste into carbon neutral synthetic fuel for ICE has anything to do with "oil not running out" (which it absolutely is, demand is at all time highs, while production is at 30 year lows and no new major oilfield has opened in the lifespan of most people reading this, just saying).

danrl2• 4 years ago

Just to add to this: You seem to be referring to the global picture. If we look at the US in isolation it is a different story. 30 yr low was ~4M barrels of crude oil from fields. We were at ~12M Barrels in 2022.

It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently.

Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.

(Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. )

macinjosh• 4 years ago

Even better if there was an economical solution for farms to turn their own ag wastes into fuel on site or even in local coops. Farmers would jump on that in a minute if they could solve their waste and fuel problems with one solution.

Gasp0de2• 4 years ago

My chainsaw runs on Aspen, which is a synthetic replacement for gasoline. It doesn't cause a headache when I'm exposed to the exhaust fumes for long times. It's quite expensive though, about 4€/l (15€/gallon).

briffle2• 4 years ago

Aspen2 is not green. its Aspen 4, which is part of the gasoline distilation process, but the oil they mix in for the 2 stroke engines is a syntetic bio oil.

https://www.aspenfuels.us/knowledge/what-is-alkylate-fuel/wh...

denton-scratch• 4 years ago

Simply put, the synthetic fuel operated much like normal gasoline would have, without the emission drawbacks of the latter.

Hmmm. The fuel is hydrocarbons; so the emissions are at minimum CO2 and particulates.

marcus0x623• 4 years ago

The usual theory here is that fuels made from plants are carbon neutral in that while the fuel produces CO2 when burned, the plant it was made from consumed an equivalent amount of CO2 while alive. (Which, even if true ignores particulate and NOX emissions. See also: green washing.)

kremi• 4 years ago

Some more drawbacks : 1. the plants are usually grown using fertilizers that are made out of, ironically, fossil fuels. 2. the process of turning the plant into fuel might also create emissions that need to be taken into account.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

This also ignores a dire problem humanity has created for itself: massive amounts of arable land wasted on fuel crops rather than food for people.

It's similar to the farming industry producing incredible amounts of food just to feed cattle rather than to feed people. Not all crops grow on all land, of course, but as long as there are large scale famines in the world, I think it's immoral to dedicate so much land towards inedible foodstuffs.

We're already burning forests under the guise of "renewable fuels" that assume we've assured that the forests are allowed grow back the next 100 years even when biofuels are no longer profitable.

There are good reasons to rid ourselves from fossil fuels where we can, not just because of global warming but also because of political reasons (the oil states getting away with literal murder and a blind eye being turned towards their funding of what would become 9/11, for one). However, I fear that these plant based "alternatives" will be quickly bought up by the oil industry, touted as the future of green energy, and used to postpone greener alternatives to the internal combustion engine yet another decade.

elif6• 4 years ago

"made from plants" will need a citation.

The Porsche/Exxon syn fuel uses natural gas as it's feedstock, for instance.

I'm pretty sure the Mazda pr guy was just smart enough to omit that detail, not that they are hiding it's magical eco friendly origins.

leovailati• 4 years ago

Apparently they produced it with agricultural by-products. So no net CO2 (other than the energy it takes for the transformation)

YesThatTom2• 4 years ago

I’m confused. This sounds like a good thing if the problem was an oil shortage, not CO2 pollution.

Explain why they aren’t solving the wrong problem?

lars-b2018• 4 years ago

The synthetic fuels are made from sources such as hay, which, theoretically is a net neutral to the carbon cycle since the hay's carbon came from the atmosphere already. This approach doesn't contribute additional CO2 to the atmosphere like traditional fuels do. However, not sure what the carbon costs are to create this synthetic fuel so that is a variable in the total carbon gain to the system.

itsoktocry• 4 years ago

Maybe we have more than one problem that needs solving?

driverdan• 4 years ago

It sounds like they ran it on straight ethanol. This isn't new or news. Many production cars can run on straight E in good weather. The mileage claim doesn't make sense though because ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline.

It'd be nice if this blogspam linked to the source so we could verify details.

etskinner• 4 years ago

I too was frustrated that they didn't say what the fuel was. It led me to believe that it's ethanol too. They just didn't want people to see the article as the nothing burger that it is.

I looked at several other sources covering this and they're all similarly quiet about what the fuel actually is. Looking at they supplier's (Coryton's) website, they boast about 'bespoke' synthetic fuels. So I'm guessing it's Mazda that's being shy about the details.

hasmanean3• 4 years ago

Yup. The "innovation" here is in the car, not the fuel.

There is another engine design, a linear piston engine, which is just a piston connected to a magnet and coil. The engine generates electricity (at a constant speed, constant load) and this is fed to an electric motor. So the car is a hybrid. It's more efficient than a regular engine (which turns a large crankshaft etc.) and the fuel probably can be more finicky since the combustion cycle can be tuned for one operating point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-piston_engine

CrazyStat• 4 years ago

Coryton (the fuel supplier) has a PR post [1] about it with a few more details. Their Sustain fuel is "blended bioethanol and biogasoline" [2]. Sustain 100% might mean either it's 100% bioethanol or 100% biogasoline, I haven't been able to find anything saying what the percentage means.

[1] https://coryton.com/lab/news/mazda-using-sustain-100-per-cen...

[2] https://coryton.com/sustain/

MuffinFlavored3• 4 years ago

what goes into making bioethanol other than corn? what goes into making biogasoline?

davewritescode2• 4 years ago

Believe it or not most passenger cars won’t run on ethanol unmodified these days. Even running on 50 or 80% ethanol blends usually requires custom ECU maps to run.

Let’s not even talk about all the things in the fuel system that seem to have a shorter life with ethanol involved, particularly injectors.

MuffinFlavored3• 4 years ago

you need to spray 30% more fuel if it’s ethanol than if it’s gasoline, no?

silisili• 4 years ago

To add to this...hasn't Brazil been producing cars capable of running on pure ethanol for the last two decades?

kuschku4• 4 years ago

it’s safe to assume that it’ll likely charge a hefty premium over traditional gasoline.
Also worth noting is that while, yes, this synthetic fuel appears to make vehicles slightly more efficient, it still greatly trails the efficiency of EVs. Consequently, vehicles using this fuel will likely always be more expensive to drive per mile than their electric equivalents.

So why are we doing this again?

worldsayshi• 4 years ago

It might be worth using for non EVs once we give healthy prioritization to sustainability?

adql• 4 years ago

Alternative for cases where electrification is hard (long haul trucks) or impossible (cargo hauling via planes)

kuschku4• 4 years ago

Those are reasonable use cases, but: - those are entirely different types of engines - which are already able to use ethanol today - and none of which mazda is even producing engines for

ianai4• 4 years ago

This is Mazda. They have yet to get serious about electrification. Worse than Toyota in that regard. I am beyond giving them the benefit of the doubt that this was anything but “hey we don’t have to make BeVs!!”

AtlasBarfed5• 4 years ago

I don't think long haul trucking is that hard to electrify. If we take the current (Pepsi) Tesla semi that can (allegedly) do 500 miles, and you also tow a trailer that is a "range extender" trailer (as in UPS already does multiple trailer towing), then you could recharge by just unhitching the depleted trailer and hitching up a precharged trailer.

Lithium-Sulfer and/or solid state will also likely come into play.

Aviation though... yeah I think that'll be synth fuel. That'll come down to how cheap solar and wind drop in LCOE in the next decade.

theshrike7910• 4 years ago

There is a dream that synthetic fuels or hydrogen will suddenly get their own Elon Musk who will drive down the wholesale price to a viable level.

But in the end (25 years+) I think synthetics will be used for hobbyists to run their vintage vehicles on track days and weekends.

kuschku4• 4 years ago

That's actually an interesting use case, vintage vehicles, old diesel trucks used near radio telescopes, etc. That said, I doubt that market would be large enough for the amount of money currently being invested in it.

duped• 4 years ago

Hydrogen has the second largest manufacturer of vehicles on the planet behind it and its still not viable.

fulafel• 4 years ago

A major problem with cars that they're very sticky because of the cost structure you're used to: expensive to buy but cheap to drive per km. Once you join the car club it's got you. This drives people to do all their transportation in cars once they have made the big investment in the the expensive car that has low marginal costs.

ICE cars running on renewable but more expensive fuel would provide a good option to the expensive EVs as we ramp down fossil fuels.

replygirl2• 4 years ago

efficiency only matters to offset the impacts of dirty methods of energy capture or storage

it's believed we can have cars and equipment on synthetic fuels producing waaay lower lifetime emissions than equivalent battery electric vehicles

when that's the case, it has potential to reduce the scope of the mobile emissions problem to a degree where we can focus almost exclusively on cleaner centralized energy capture, for which the most difficult engineering has already been done, and storage, which needs more attention and investment either way

it would also allow for a quicker transition away from fossil, by giving people a more affordable transition option (or free, if cars don't need conversion) vs. buying electric, and by using more of the energy infrastructure that's already in place

scoopertrooper2• 4 years ago

Because we could move the entire current stock of cars over to less carbon intensive fuel without having to build an entirely new fleet.

Keeping in mind that manufacturing new cars (and the associated resource extraction) is extremely carbon intensive, then a carbon neutral-ish fuel might actually be the best option overall on a meaningful timescale.

MuffinFlavored3• 4 years ago

if 87 octane gasoline is $2.99/gallon and this is even 30% more, I’m not sure how you can expect to force the majority of the population (who is supposedly scraping by) to switch

maybe the government could subsidize it as national debt?

anonkogudhyfhhf• 4 years ago

Because they have been dragging their feet and will go bankrupt and this is a last ditch effort to slow down the transition to EVs

credit_guy• 4 years ago

Range could be a reason too. EV's have a decent range nowadays, but in wintertime the range could decrease dramatically. With an ICE you always know what your range is.

A hybrid can give the best of both worlds. A hybrid with a battery range of 50 miles can reduce your ICE usage by a factor of 10 easily (the vast majority of trips are shorter than that). But a lot of people think that reducing emissions by only 90% is not enough. With this you get to the full 100%.

AtlasBarfed5• 4 years ago

Well, ICEs do drop in range in winter. Not as much as a BEV, and I believe some of the BEV range loss was the HVAC which has improved.

I too think the 50 mile hybrid would have been a game changer. In an ideal world, 10 years after the Prius release (1997?) in 2007 the US government mandated a 50 mile all-electric range PHEV for all consumer cars.

But now the car companies face a choice: invest in a BEV drivetrain, or invest in a PHEV drivetrain. Almost all will do the BEV, because CEOs that don't get fired (see: BMW, VW, etc).

kehrin• 4 years ago

Sportscars and motorcycles are fun :)

account_created• 4 years ago

Is this the one that was discussed on Joe Rogan by Randal Carlson recently?

marcus0x623• 4 years ago

1) How much of this fuel could be made at scale — how much of the type of agricultural waste they use is available worldwide?

2) Petrol is great for passenger cars, but the world runs on diesel and fuels that are more or less equivalent to diesel, like Jet-1A. Can they make that?

theshrike7910• 4 years ago

The global agricultural waste production isn't enough to run the current amount of vehicles on compressed biogas - never mind this synthetic stuff. It's an amazing option among others though. CBG is easy to produce locally and gasoline powered vehicles can be modded to use it quite cheaply as long as you can fit the CBG tanks somewhere.

pfdietz3• 4 years ago

Companies have made drop-in compatible jet fuel from biomass.

https://www.virent.com/

marcus0x623• 4 years ago

Does that work with the process described in the article, can it be done at scale, how much does it cost? While I hear about a couple of these breakthrough alternate fuels a year, I’ve yet to see a single one that doesn’t fall down on at least one of those areas. The first one isn’t a deal-killer — you could have an alternate fuel product for petrol and a different one for fuel oils, but if they can’t be made economically at scale, these technologies are useless for all but niche purposes.

firecall• 4 years ago

You can run a diesel engine on vegetable oil!

thinkcontext• 4 years ago

Not as useful as one would hope. The world produces 20M tons of vegetable oil vs 4B tons of petroleum.

greenthrow2• 4 years ago

Synthetic fuels should only be used going forward for hobbyists who want to keep classic cars going. They likely will be, and should be, expensive. Even if they are "carbon neutral" (unlikely as they still have higher costs associated with transportation than electricity), they still involve burning which always creates pollution, and any ICE requires lubrication and cooling which also today involves toxic chemicals.

EVs are much more efficient and better for the environment beyond the most obvious and biggest benefit of not having a tailpipe that spews CO2 into the air.

In other words; nobody should be hoping "carbon neutral fuel" is a path to continuing our status quo.

elif6• 4 years ago

And as here, syn fuels are useful for satisfying regulators.

api• 4 years ago

Biofuels have at least two huge issues:

The first is that solar PV has already well exceeded the efficiency of growing crops for fuel by multiples. Then there’s wind, nuclear, hydro, etc. Biofuels consume far more land than renewable and zero carbon ways of generating electricity. Even worse they consume fresh water. Electric generation consumes very little water by comparison.

Secondly and related to this biofuels compete with agriculture for food. You frequently hear about using farm waste but there is only so much of that. Our machines use more calories than we do so try to scale that up and soon you are growing crops for cars. That’s a bad path to go down in a world where population is expected to peak as high as 11 billion. Much better to run machines on stuff we can’t eat than to set up a competition.

The only good bet against EVs is in heavy and long range vehicles not cars. I am skeptical of electric trucks not because they can’t be done but because I am skeptical of our will to build out adequate charge infrastructure. But trucks account for a lot less liquid fuel use than cars so solving the car problem is a huge win. If we electrified light vehicles we could cut liquid fuel use by more than 50%.

That doesn’t mean all car companies should totally cease ICE production though. There will still be some market for them into the foreseeable future. I expect EVs to take the bulk of the market though.

fsh• 4 years ago

I don't think that this is a very good application for the technology. Compared to lithium batteries, synthetic fuels have much higher energy density, but much lower energy efficiency. Modern EVs achieve plenty of range, charge quickly, and the somewhat larger weight doesn't really matter in a vehicle, unless you want to race it.

However, I am quite excited about using them for CO2-neutral long-distance flights. Being able to reach any place on earth in 24h is awesome, and there is simply no battery technology that can power a practical airplane.

mauli• 4 years ago

Same here, am excited for what happens in the coming year. I did read on HN some time ago and just checked, SWISS airline working together with Synhelion https://www.swiss.com/magazine/en/inside-swiss/sustainabilit...

tmpburning3• 4 years ago

I don't think that this is a very good application for the technology. Compared to lithium batteries,

Mazda also have an all-electric car, the Mx-30. (Starting MSRP $33,470)

pornel3• 4 years ago

It's the worst EV on the market. It's only a compliance car, not something they expect anyone to drive.

Toyota/Subaru aren't much better. Japanese carmakers seem to hope that BEVs are only a fad.

elif6• 4 years ago

Except it's not CO2 neutral.

It just didn't come from dinosaurs, it's still a long hydrocarbon that burns.

dsfyu404ed5• 4 years ago

What timeline for CO2 neutrality will satisfy you?

The fuel in TFA game from ag-waste. So presumably it's carbon neutral on a ~1-2yr timeline.

sbaiddn2• 4 years ago

When you consider the limited availability of batteries, electric vehicles don't make sense compared to hybrid ones.

Neither make sense compared to halving our speed limits.

b34r• 4 years ago

“For the first time I can remember, we can access all the supply we need for both businesses.” Martin Viecha, Tesla IR, September 2022

https://electrek.co/2022/09/12/tesla-access-all-the-batterie...

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Efficiency is a double edged sword. Hydrocarbons will always have a higher energy density than batteries due to physics, which is great when moving heavy things.

Trucks are probably a good use case for synthetic zero or negative emission fuels.

elif6• 4 years ago

It is disgusting for the author to call the synthetic fuel "emission free"

It's still a long hydrocarbon chain that breaks down into CO2 during combustion.

This entire line of reasoning is avoided in the article, so I can only imagine it was sponsored by BP or SA.

elif6• 4 years ago

1. Synthetic fuels still take a minimum of 110g CO2 to produce one MJ of fuel.

2. Synthetic fuels still emit CO2, sox, nox etc. at the tailpipe

3. "Synthetic" fuels still use natural gas as the feedstock in production.

Loic• 4 years ago

4. We do not have enough renewable biomass to use as feedstock to replace our current use of non synthetic fuel.

Synthetic fuel from renewable feedstock should only be used where we cannot replace ICE, for example planes.

Synthetic fuel for cars is pure heresy from the environmental point of view. We already are at the limit in the production of wood pellet for heating (the forest are suffering enormously from climate change), bio gas is using not only waste but also corn and "good" crops to be produced.

And of course, the process to convert all this biomass into a fuel is consuming a lot of energy.

Please, do not dream of everything green with synthetic fuels everywhere, this can only be part of a small part of the transition.

IronWolve• 4 years ago

I saw a video of an offgrid station that makes hydrogen from solar/water to power farm/work trucks. That seemed pretty green and cost effective in the long run.

dieselgate2• 4 years ago

This is a cool data point but I personally wouldn't call 45 mpg "staggering" - it's definitely good but not unprecedented by any means, many TDIs or smaller gas engines can get that on the freeway. The research into synthetic gasoline fuels is inspiring but at a certain point seem impractical and too-little-too-late. There are already well established "alternative" fueling technologies that are very easily accessible and likely cheaper.

RhysU2• 4 years ago

I just did a long highway trip in an MX-5 and got about 38 mpg on the recommended 93-octane gasoline. I was not driving the vehicle to optimize for mileage. The article quotes the same. I mention it because it is an obtainable 38 mpg.

dieselgate2• 4 years ago

Driving long distances on the freeway typically is the best way to optimize for mileage though? at least seems you couldn’t have been going too fast ;) Must’ve been fun in the mx5

Orangeair• 4 years ago

Does anyone know what ever happened to Mazda's skyactiv thing? Was supposedly going to help ICEs be more fuel efficient by adding an extra stroke cycle with water? Seemed very promising, but I haven't heard anything about it in years.

jayavanth• 4 years ago

It's out there but not in the US. It doesn't deliver as much torque/HP and apparently US market prefers the torque over fuel efficiency

mdorazio• 4 years ago

You’re probably thinking of Skyactiv-X [1] which is kind of hybrid between a normal spark ignition and compression ignition. It’s been in the 3 in Europe for a couple years but never came to the US. I’ve heard it’s a combination of cost and not-great horsepower, plus it runs louder. Basically for a lot more cost you get something inferior to hybrid in a lot of ways.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyactiv

bl_valance• 4 years ago

Toyota was also testing out synthetic fuels on their 3cylinder platform. I'm glad mfgs are testing different things and not just sticking to one thing just because everyone else is doing that. Interesting how Japanese carmakers are still not convinced on full electric, time will only tell. https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/toyota-gr-86-n...

LP3L• 4 years ago

Can we just use Ethanol with hybrid system? I mean, in ethanol are very common fuel, if we combine this with hybrid, thas a win win IMO.

Mazda has tested a synthetic fuel in an unmodified MX5 on a 1000-mile road trip

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