You can hardly have failed to spot the banners advertising HVO fuel on forecourts. The likes of Circle K and Certa have invested heavily in rolling out Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (hence the acronym) fuel, for which some pretty big claims are made.
The biggest one being that because HVO is made from old cooking oil, mixed with a bit of biofuel made from fresh crops, it’s 90 per cent lower in CO2 emissions than conventional diesel.
Wait, it gets better. Although HVO is generally more expensive than diesel – up to €0.30 pricier per litre, depending on where you’re buying it – it’s not wildly out of kilter with regular fossil fuel and it has other benefits too.
The chief one being that it’s a straight drop-in replacement for diesel. While not every car maker overtly says that HVO works in their engines, the fact is that chemically, it’s simple stuff.
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Kevin McPartlan, chief executive of Fuels For Ireland (FFI), says we’re mad to ignore the potential of HVO and other low-carbon liquid fuels in our battle with climate change.
“There are critical gaps in our national climate policies and there’s an urgent need for practical, actionable measures” said McPartlan.
“Despite the Government’s ambitious Climate Action Plan, we are significantly lagging in our emissions reduction targets for 2030. The report’s findings clearly indicate that our current strategies are failing to deliver the necessary outcomes.
“The focus on electrifying the transport sector and retrofitting homes with heat pumps, while commendable in their aspirations, has not delivered the expected emission reductions. The current strategy heavily favours EVs as the primary solution for decarbonising transport.
“However, the data show that this approach is not yielding the needed reductions. We need to expand our focus to include advanced, synthetic, and biofuels, which offer immediate and significant emission reductions.”
[ Irish biofuel sales fall even as demand risesOpens in new window ]
However, there are major reservations when it comes to the use of fuels such as HVO. While the idea behind them might be laudable – if the claims can be backed up, then we could trim the CO2 emissions of every non-electric car on Irish roads by 90 per cent with no extra infrastructural investment, and at only a small extra cost to drivers – there is considerable devil in the details.
One of the biggest issues is how closely you monitor the making of such fuels. If you really can make HVO from fully renewable resources, then perhaps it has some efficacy. However, there are serious concerns that “virgin” products, such as palm oil, are making their way into the biofuels chain.
Eco-lobby group Transport & Environment (T&E) recently released a report which showed that, taking the strictest possible monitoring and policing of biofuel production, European demand for such fuel would outstrip supply by as much as a factor of nine by 2050.
Or, to put it more simply, we can’t produce enough of the stuff without cheating, which rather defeats the point.
According to Lucien Mathieu, cars director at T&E: “The push for biofuels is absurd. Europeans can’t eat enough pork or fries to sustainably run even a fraction of Europe’s cars, let alone its ships and planes. Why are the car and oil lobbies flogging non-solutions when we have a ready technology in electric cars? This is nothing but a delay tactic that will leave Europe uncompetitive in the global EV market.”
T&E’s argument is that advanced biofuels such as waste-based fuels are not scalable. Europe already imports more than 80 per cent of its used cooking oil from places like China and Malaysia.
There are critical gaps in our national climate policies and there’s an urgent need for practical, actionable measures
— Kevin McPartlan, Fuels For Ireland
Animal fats are one of the most popular waste feedstocks. Already today, European cars use 1.3 million tonnes of animal fats per year – equivalent to 200 million slaughtered pigs. For every new car running on animal fats, around 120 pigs would be required a year, T&E’s analysis finds.
Alternatively, a new car running on used cooking oil would need you to consume 25kg of chips per day to generate enough waste oil. Which is a stretch, even for the hungriest of us.
However, there’s a counterargument to this, which is that perfect is often the enemy of good.
According to McPartlan: “Ideology must make way for efficacy. We must adopt a more pragmatic and diversified approach to climate action. This means prioritising practical, scalable solutions that can be implemented quickly and effectively.
“The time for aspirational planning is over; we need decisive action grounded in practicality to ensure a sustainable and achievable path to reducing our carbon footprint.”
There is another category of fuels to consider, one which sounds even more magical than HVO or biofuel. E-fuels.
These are made by chemically combining hydrogen extracted from water with carbon extracted from the air to create a simple hydrocarbon – essentially the purest petrol you’ve ever seen.
Porsche, for one, has been working hard on this tech for a decade now, while Formula One is set to embrace synthetic e-fuels for the 2026 season.
Mazda, too, reckons that such fuels could be hugely useful, especially if you combine it with a system – built into a car – that chemically removes carbon from the air around it as it drives. It’s not sci-fi: Mazda has already put just such a system into a racing car, which it’s running in the Super Taikyu race series in Japan to stress-test the tech.
The “Mazda Mobile Carbon Capture Technology” prototype tested uses a Zeolite (a type of crystalline, porous minerals formed from volcanic ash) structure to absorb CO2 from exhaust gases and stores it in a tank. That stored CO2 can then, theoretically, be used to combine with extracted hydrogen to make more e-fuel. Or, in Mazda’s specific case, it can be used to grow micro-algae, used in the process of creating a new type of e-fuel.
Ryuichi Umeshita, Mazda’s chief technology officer, said: “Right now, I think we’re being asked about the meaning of driving. If it’s just about reaching a destination at a set time, you don’t need a car. People choose to drive because there’s a strong will to drive.
People will be able to drive with pride, knowing they’re helping the environment with every mile
— Ryuichi Umeshita, Mazda
“When you operate the car yourself, make detours on your own terms, and actively seek out enjoyment, it makes you feel positive and enriches your life. People will be able to drive with pride, knowing they’re helping the environment with every mile. That’s the future we’re working toward.”
However, T&E points out problems with magical e-fuels too, noting that – going by current figures – it would cost on average €10,000 more per year to run a family car on e-fuels (although, to be fair, that’s based on per-litre prices which are a long way away from actual commercial production levels) and that creating enough e-fuel to supply just ten per cent of cars on European roads would require 26 per cent more renewable electricity than the Continent currently generates.
In other words, there’s no easy answer. Could HVO, bi-fuel, and e-fuels make a useful contribution to cutting our transport CO2 emissions? Yes.
Is actually putting any of that into action, with the right safeguards and oversight to ensure genuine CO2 reductions, easy? No.
Does that mean it’s not worth doing? We have to be careful that an aspiration for perfection doesn’t cause us to discard that which is good enough for now.
