The eFuel production will bring Porsche closer towards carbon neutrality across the board.
Many car manufacturers, Porsche included, have started to produce battery electric vehicles in an effort to lower their carbon footprint. However, most industry experts agree that battery electric vehicles are only going to make up a small fraction of cars on the road for a long time. Plus, there’s all the existing petrol vehicles on the road to deal with – those are going to produce carbon until they’re outlawed altogether. The solution – eFuel. And now Porsche has just produced their first batch of it in Chile and they’ve pumped it right into a 911.
eFuels are completely synthetic and made from water and carbon dioxide using energy attained from wind turbines. The carbon dioxide is used to make these efuels has already been released into the atmosphere. So when the fuel is burned in a petrol engine, the carbon dioxide that is emitted isn’t new. Hence, eFuels provide a very nearly CO2-neutral way to run existing petrol cars.
The company’s first eFuel plant is located in Punta Arenas, by the south of Chile where strong winds blow nearly all year around for sustained energy generation from wind turbines. From there, the fuel is shipped to the nearby port of Cabo Negro, close to the Strait of Magellan. This allows it to be distributed globally with existing infrastructure just like traditional fuels.
“Porsche is committed to a double-e path: e-mobility and eFuels as a complementary technology. Using eFuels reduces CO2 emissions. Looking at the entire traffic sector, the industrial production of synthetic fuels should keep being pushed forward worldwide. With the eFuels pilot plant, Porsche is playing a leading role in this development,” says Barbara Frenkel, Member of the Executive Board for Procurement at Porsche AG.
“The potential of eFuels is huge. There are currently more than 1.3 billion vehicles with combustion engines worldwide. Many of these will be on the roads for decades to come, and eFuels offer the owners of existing cars a nearly carbon-neutral alternative. As the manufacturer of high-performance, efficient engines, Porsche has a wide range of know-how in the field of fuels,” adds Michael Steiner, Member of the Executive Board for Development and Research at Porsche AG.
Right now, the ‘Haru Oni’ plant in Chile is set up to produce some 130,000 litres of eFuel a year. The first batch will be used for projects like the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup and at Porsche Experience Centres. Later, the project will be scaled up to 55 million litres of fuel a year around the middle of the decade. Before the end of the decade, Porsche aims to produce around 550 million litres of the stuff annually.
Porsche’s investment in eFuels today amounts to US$100 million.
