Synthetic Fuels

The automotive world is constantly growing and evolving at a rapid pace. Just this last year, Tesla broke their previous sales record in their 3rd quarter with almost 140,000 vehicles sold. More and more manufacturers announce and release new electric vehicles (EV) every year.

The accessibility of electric vehicles is steadily increasing, even the antithesis of EVs, the gas-guzzling Hummer of the 2000s has returned as an EV, and a recent Israeli startup is hard at work making a market-ready car battery that can charge in as little as 5 minutes.

It seems very apparent that the age of the internal combustion engine (ICE) is coming to an end. However, the many millions of cars made in the past 100 years will not just cease to exist. It may be inevitable that upper-middle-class dads will never cease to want to have a nice Sunday cruise in their hand-me-down mustang. So what happens when the war on fossil fuels is over and the last remaining drops of gasoline are what remains in the gas tank?

Porsche believes there's something they can do to help keep everyone's favorite bedroom poster car on the road. With one of the longest ever consistent production of enthusiast cars, Porsche is very proud of its history post-1945 and has a big interest in keeping the embodiment of its legacy running for the years to come. Synthetic fuels may be at the core of that goal.

The plan with synthetic fuels is that they will be able to be used with any vehicle that can run on traditional gasoline, they will cost much less energy to produce, and their emissions will be significantly healthier for the planet and overall put cumulative energy consumption to keep an ICE vehicle on the road on par with that of an EV. The idea is not too far-fetched either, already there are multiple alternative substances powering cars.

Many fuels around the world are blended with 10% ethanol which burns much more efficiently and cleaner than pure gasoline. However, it has some major drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is that the more ethanol that a vehicle has in a tank of gas, the quicker the vehicle burns through the fuel due to only containing 2/3rds of the chemical energy as gasoline. Another problem is that while ethanol itself is deemed as carbon-neutral to burn, its production is the exact opposite and still relies on the help of fossil fuels.

These are problems Porsche is trying to solve with its synthetic fuels. Currently, Porsche is putting synthetic fuels to the test on the race track with their GT3 Cup car in the 2021-2022 Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup race series. Currently, these synthetic fuels are being manufactured in a handful of plants that enlist the help of wind energy to help in the process of refining the fuels to counter the issue of counterproductive manufacturing emissions, a problem that still greatly plagues electric vehicles production.

If Porsche’s endeavors bear sweet fruits, there may be a much better future that allows the past and present of automobiles to coexist and cause substantially less harm to the environment.

Written by Issac Jones

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