Porsche wants to produce at least 20% of its cars with internal combustion engines after 2030, and synthetic fuels could make it possible

We have all read the news in recent months announcing that the sale of cars with internal combustion engines will be banned in the EU from 2035, and the UK will do it even earlier, in 2030. However, Porsche, however advanced both in its current electric cars and plans for future electric cars, it says it would be okay with 80% of its cars being electric, but would like to make and sell at least 20% of cars with internal combustion engines, to keep the passion alive and to keep that breath for which people choose to buy a Porsche and keep it for years on end. And Porsche revealed curious information about how they could keep the internal combustion engines.

First of all, the people at Porsche remember that their cars are so adored by collectors that even today most of the Porsches that have been produced are still in circulation or in collections, so they have a much longer lifespan than they would could have an electric car, in time. Secondly, the legal norm approved for the year 2035 in EU does not prohibit internal combustion engines as a product category, but limits cars to zero CO2 emissions. And here comes the big question — could there be an internal combustion engine with zero CO2 emissions?

Many of us would answer with a resounding YES, offering as examples the engines that burn hydrogen in their combustion, such as the BMW Hydrogen 7 E65 from 15 years ago, or the hydrogen engines intensively tested by Toyotain the last two years. And it's absolutely correct, those engines emit zero CO2 emissions, only water vapor, and Porsche is among the manufacturers that test them. But there are some limitations that are still difficult to avoid, such as the large tanks needed to store hydrogen. If it is stored in gaseous form, the tanks have to withstand high pressure, and therefore, are heavier and bulkier. If it is stored in liquid form, it is necessary to ensure a super low temperature, and within a few days that hydrogen would be transformed into gas anyway and would be evacuated, as happened with the BMW Hydrogen 7. If it is switched to fuel cells , everything becomes much more efficient, but the car will be set in motion by an electric motor already, not by an internal combustion engine. So Porsche continues to look for hydrogen solutions, but it also has another vision, related to synthetic fuels.

Two months ago, Porsche announced the inauguration of the first synthetic fuel plant in Chile and went into the depth of what this fuel means. Effectively speaking, it would be a gasoline that is not produced by refining the oil extracted from the ground, but in the laboratory. The final composition of gasoline is mainly carbon and hydrogen atoms, so if we extract the CO2 already in the air and the hydrogen from any water, we can combine them in such a way that we have as a final product an even purer gasoline than the extracted one from the ground.

The problem is that this whole process is energy-intensive, that is, electricity is needed to provide the heat necessary for capturing and for the distillation and mixing reactions. If we use electricity from a fossil fuel plant, the whole equation doesn't make much sense. But everything becomes much more logical, if we use wind or solar energy, for example. Then, in that synthetic fuel manufacturing process, no CO2 will be emitted, but on the contrary, CO2 will be captured from the air, in order to use the carbon in the production of synthetic gasoline. Afterwards, that synthetic gasoline can end up in any internal combustion engine and the exact same CO2 that was captured from the atmosphere during production will be released back. Therefore, the final impact will be zero CO2.

And here Porsche has to work a bit in the bureaucracy, so that its future cars, which would run on such fuel, can be qualified as having zero CO2 emissions thanks to these synthetic fuels. The important part in this idea of ​​those from Porsche is that they will also be the producers of these synthetic fuels, with different octane numbers. Their first test factory was opened in Chile, and the place was not accidental, because there the wind turbines operate 4 times more often at full capacity than in the most favorable places in Germany. Now, it is a pilot plant, to demonstrate the technology, but in just 2 years Porsche wants to produce 55 million liters annually, and in another 2 years they want to reach a figure of 550 million liters annually.

Thus, Porsche could become a major global producer of synthetic fuels already in 2027 and could argue its idea in front of the authorities that it can guarantee that the 20% of cars with internal combustion engines it will produce have zero CO2 emissions, in fact, which would mean that they would have the right to continue producing them, even under the conditions of the bans after 2030-2035. And the beautiful part is that he would be right, because purely chemically and scientifically, these synthetic fuels can really ensure that cars with internal combustion engines do not use gasoline extracted from new oil from the ground, releasing new amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, but work in a sort of battery-storage regime, whereby they first extract CO2 from the atmosphere, then emit it back, and this cycle repeats continuously, without the need to extract new oil from the ground! And it's not a matter of perpetual motion, there are energy losses, as I said, but that energy is provided by the wind turbines that produce electricity. And synthetic fuel can be used, theoretically, by any car with an internal combustion engine, without the need for an adaptation, so we are talking about new cars, and classic cars or bought at any time in the past.

More than that, Porsche says that synthetic fuels can become the most viable solution not only for cars with internal combustion engines, but also for airplanes or ships, where the weight of possible electric batteries plays a critical role. So, the future can sound interesting, if humanity will listen to these Porsche engineers!