It's not fossil fuel but the energy-draining process isn't ready for mass production.
Porsche wants you to embrace wind farms. Yes, you, the petrolhead with a 911, you are the target market for demanding more wind and solar and hydroelectric and geothermal power, as soon as possible.
A lot of carbon used to be sequestered in the ground, in the form of fossil fuels. We dug them up and refined them and burnt them and now they’re in the air, which is causing the world to heat up. The first thing we need to do is stop getting new fossil fuels out and leave the carbon where it’s not causing any harm and the second thing is we need to get the stuff out of the air, all of which sounds a lot simpler on paper than it is.
It’s an energy intensive process; the absolute best estimate is that it takes about 10-11MWh to produce 2,240lbs of methanol, before you start the process of converting that to gasoline and that number is very optimistic. The whole thing, of course, might actually be quite efficient compared to a millions-of-years process of extreme pressure and heat but the planet did that for us whereas we have to find the juice to make this version.
Which makes sense: by investing in synthetic fuels Porsche isn’t cancelling its electric vehicle programme, this is kind of a side gig. Especially to the global fuel market.The project is opening with an ambition to generate 130,000 liters of synthetic gasoline per year. Aside from needing to find thousands of gigawatt hours of energy to do that, that’s really not very much fuel; it’s just shy of 600 drums.
There will always be energy needed to break molecular bonds and split water into hydrogen, there will always be more required to then force the hydrogen to bond with carbon. That’s just how things work. Combustion isn’t very efficient, as a process, so the energy got back out in a vehicle will be significantly less than went in to making the fuel, by default.
“You have a lot of thermal energy from the electrolyzing process and you could use that for the synthesis process in the next step,” explained Steiner. “So [heat used] for the synthesis from H2 and CO2 to methanol, from the electrolyzer as well as from the last step, methanol to gas. You also need some thermal energy to get some of the water out of methanol, the initial grade and quality of methanol you gain in such a plant still contains too much water.
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