Porsche strongly focuses on e-fuels: “Fundamental for the transition” | FormulaPassion.it

E-fuels will become increasingly central by the end of the decade. This is what Porsche says, increasingly convinced that synthetic fuels will play a fundamental role in the transition process and will also offer an alternative to the switch to electric, while at the same time allowing for a reduction in emissions especially with regard to the vehicle fleet.

The e-fuel plant in Chile

The Zuffenhausen-based company has been heavily invested in developing alternative fuels, with a pilot plant in Chile in collaboration with HIF Global and other partners. The South American e-fuels plant is run on renewable energy and currently produces synthetic fuel that is used in the Porsche Supercup racing series and elsewhere. Porsche says e-fuels can also be used on a larger scale, reducing the environmental impact of the millions of cars that will remain on the road after the European Union bans the sale of diesel and gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

Porsche’s strategies

“Since we started this project, more and more people, customers and politicians, have understood that we cannot just promote electric mobility – explained Michael Steiner, head of research and development at Porsche – It is the main road, but we have to think about the huge, huge existing fleet of ICE cars, which is still growing. Everyone has to replace the new cars step by step with battery electric cars, but we have to be careful about how we could replace all that fossil energy that we put into cars, ships, planes and so on. We see this as a great additional strategy for electric mobility and we think that we could really help the environment more quickly, because we could do something for the existing cars.”

Synthetic fuels instead of fossil fuels

The manager of the Zuffenhausen company, in an interview with Autocar, then underlined how the heart of the problem is the quantity of e-fuel that can be produced and above all in what quantity synthetic fuels could replace fossil fuels: “We could, little by little, gallon by gallon, replace fossil fuel with e-fuel by blending a mixture. The key is how many tons you replace, not how. We could start like we did with biofuels, blending them. The important thing is to reduce the use of fossil fuels.”