Right now you can buy a sustainable, plant-based alternative to diesel for your car. It’s called hydro-treated vegetable oil, or HVO, and its proponents – which include such fuel retailers as Certa, Circle K, and Maxol – claim that it has emissions levels some 90 per cent lower than fossil fuel diesel.
HVO is made from treating waste cooking oil and other fat sources with hydrogen to refine it into a diesel-like fuel, which is much more environmentally friendly in other ways than conventional diesel. For instance, if HVO is spilt, there’s no environmental impact as it’s just vegetable oil.
So, given that there are more than two million petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars on Irish roads, wouldn’t it make much more sense – rather than trying to replace all of these cars with electric vehicles, whose batteries have their own particular environmental impact – to simply replace the fuel with carbon-neutral alternatives? And if we’re doing that for cars, why not also do it for other things that need liquid fuel, from aeroplanes to household boilers?
That’s certainly the plan espoused by Fuel For Ireland (FFI), which represents the Irish fuel supply and retail industry. Kevin McPartlan, FFI’s chief executive, tells The Irish Times: “Government policy in the last few years, when it comes to reducing emissions from transport, has been entirely about EVs. But we’re not hitting our targets: we’re not hitting our emissions targets and we’re not hitting our EV uptake targets.
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“If we’re serious about tackling the climate emergency, then we have to be using every available tool to do that. To me, the objective is not necessarily to move heavily to electric. The objective is to eliminate carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions from transport, but the last three ministers for the environment, every time they talk only of electrification as the way of decarbonising transport, they’re sending a message to the markets not to invest in those other things, services. And that’s crazy.”
McPartlan’s pitch is not that biofuels and e-fuels (synthetic fuel made by drawing carbon from the air and chemically combining it with “green” hydrogen to make a synthetic hydrocarbon) will supplant or replace electric vehicles, but will act in concert with them, reducing or eliminating transport CO2 at every opportunity.
However, there are significant obstacles, not least the huge investments needed in synthetic fuel and biofuel production, and the energy input cost of making them, shipping them and pumping them.
“E-fuels require five times the energy to make them and are only really suitable for applications that can’t be electrified. The problem is, some are arguing against going all-in on EVs on the false promise of e-fuels,” says Prof Hannah Daly, a climate expert from University College Cork.
Others claim that e-fuels and biofuels are just a waste of energy, both literal and figurative.
“The production of e-fuels, which are chemically similar to petrol and diesel, will still be in its infancy by the time of Europe’s planned phase-out of sales of internal combustion cars. Just five million cars out of the EU’s projected fleet of 287 million could fully run on synthetic fuel in 2035,” says eco think-tank Transport & Environment (T&E) in an analysis of the volumes forecasted by the industry.
“E-fuels are presented as a carbon-neutral way to prolong the life of combustion engine technology. But the industry’s own data shows there will only be enough for a tiny fraction of cars on the road. Lawmakers should close the door to this Trojan horse for the fossil fuel industry,” says Yoann Gimbert, e-mobility analyst at T&E.
Equally, there’s going to be a bigger draw on biofuel and e-fuel resources – air transport. While other European nations can rely on rail connections for long-haul journeys, Ireland can only rely on aircraft, and that means relying on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
SAF, according to the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, will need to be produced in vast amounts by 2030 if it’s to achieve only a five per cent blend with fossil fuels – 2.3 million tonnes by 2030. Aircraft and batteries, at least with current and foreseen technology, don’t really mix, so SAF is the only way forward for flying, and aviation will likely draw in most if not all of the available biofuel and e-fuel resources.
That said, there are other potential sources of fuel. Trifol Resources, based in Tipperary, has a trial going on right now to turn waste plastic – itself originally made from petroleum byproducts – back into fuel. Given the mountains of plastic waste humanity has created in the past 70 years, perhaps turning that into fuel could eventually make for a useful source of carbon-neutral liquid fuels.
Charging up, rather than filling up, is likely still the ultimate future for road transport, but tantalising possibilities remain.
