Porsche saved the internal combustion engine cars

Cars with internal combustion engines are on the way to extinction. Is it really so? Well, the Alfa Rent a Car Airport Cluj office announces that the German car manufacturer Porsche is working on a technology that can save both gasoline and diesel engines forever. The European Union and Britain have decided to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines from 2035, but this new technology is so promising that politicians responsible for regulating new car sales have just made one of the biggest policy changes in history of automobiles and in this article we will tell you the reason why they changed their minds. We'll explain why this technology from Porsche is so important, and how you'll be able to continue to purchase brand new cars with powerful engines in the 2030s, 2040s and beyond.

We feel like governments all over the world have waged a war on diesel and petrol engines, but it's one thing to give us tax breaks if we buy a zero-emission car and another to ban us from buying them altogether. This is not only about exotic cars like Lamborghini and Ferrari with huge naturally aspirated engines that develop over 700 horsepower, but about any car that is equipped with an internal combustion engine, even our domestic Dacias or Toyota Prius hybrids are in danger. The reason dates back to 2017 when the EU and UK introduced plans to ban diesel or petrol cars after 2040. As if that wasn't surprising enough, things got worse as the EU and UK decided to ban 10 years faster these cars, in the year 2030. Car manufacturers could still sell plug-in hybrid cars for a few more years but these cars too were to be banned after 2035. Thus the only cars that could be bought after this year it would have been only those on batteries or with hydrogen cells like the Toyota Mirai, about which the Alfa Rent a Car Cluj Napoca Airport Avram Iancu wrote in this article (https://alfarentacar.ro/b-masinile-pe-hidrogen-cum-functioneaza-tehnologia). Canada and California have also decided to join this policy of banning new cars with internal combustion engines from the year 2035.

However, these regulations created several problems. First of all, most of the car manufacturers were not too happy with these decisions because the people who run them are conservative with a few exceptions like Elon Musk who is the director of Tesla. They have to be selective about the type of machines they build and want to make the most of every technology that comes out of the R&D labs to increase profits. Thus, big names such as Toyota have begun to worry about putting all their eggs in one basket, that of electric cars, especially given that they have spent so much on the development of cars with internal combustion engines and transmission systems hybrids. In December 2022 Akio Toyoda who is the president of Toyota stated that most automakers doubt that exclusively producing electric cars is a good thing and he also stated that politicians must be realistic about this goal of banning the sale of cars new ones with thermal engines after the year 2035. To be fair, the car rental company Alfa Rent a Car Cluj Napoca must mention that Toyota has never been a leader in building electric cars since their first electric car was launched it wasn't until 2022 in the form of the bZ4X SUV that they helped make hybrids popular with the Prius model.

Toyota isn't the only carmaker concerned about the 2035 deadline. Bavarian manufacturer BMW is also taking a stand. BMW started on the road of electric cars ten years ago with the i3 and now has a lot of electric cars on sale like the new i4 (G26), iX3 (G08), iX (i20), the new i7 (G70) and is on way to launch the new i5 (G60) in the fall. BMW President Olivier Zipse recently said that an electric car-only world only works if electricity is available in abundance, if there are developed public and private charging networks and access to raw materials. Instead, reality shows that we don't have all of these things at the moment, so on the one hand we have governments wanting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from personal cars and on the other hand we have the biggest car companies in the world who say banning internal combustion engines is not the answer. Until this month it seemed that they were at an impasse, but the office of Alfa Rent a Car Airport Cluj Napoca informs you that the EU governors will allow car manufacturers to sell cars with thermal engines after the year 2035 with only one condition, they must work on synthetic fuels.

So what are synthetic fuels, and what do they have to do with Porsche? Well, gasoline and diesel are made from petroleum that is drilled out of the ground and is an organic material that has been compressed over millions of years. This is why gasoline and diesel are called fossil fuels. Synthetic fuels are entirely created by humans, and no wells or offshore oil rigs need to be built to get it out of the ground. Synthetic fuels were invented a hundred years ago and since then this technology has been improved and developed by various companies, including Porsche. The result of the work of these companies is called e-fuels or eFuels. The good thing about these synthetic fuels is that they can turn any internal combustion engine car into a carbon footprint neutral vehicle.

How are these e-fuels obtained? Porsche's synthetic gasoline production process, also called eFuel, is based on using renewable energy such as wind, solar or hydroelectric power to produce hydrogen through the electrolysis of water. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide (CO2) taken from the air, using a series of chemical reactions, to produce a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons, including synthetic gasoline. The company Alfa Rent a Car Cluj Napoca Airport Avram Iancu informs you that this synthetic gasoline can be burned in internal combustion engines without any modifications. Porsche is testing this synthetic fuel on its own cars and is working in partnership with Exxon Mobil to produce synthetic race fuels for the 911 GT3 race cars in the Mobil 1 Super Cup.

Porsche plans to produce the synthetic gasoline at a new production facility in Chile, which is operational from 2022. This facility would produce the synthetic gasoline from carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen, using renewable energy. Porsche claims that the synthetic gasoline produced by this process has a zero carbon footprint, as the carbon dioxide emissions produced during use are offset by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the air during production. The aim of Porsche's synthetic gasoline production is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and provide a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels for existing internal combustion engine automobiles that could be powered by synthetic gasoline without requiring significant modifications.

What about diesel cars? Porsche's synthetic gasoline production process, also called eFuel, can also produce synthetic diesel, as the process is capable of producing a wide range of liquid hydrocarbons, including synthetic diesel. The production process of eFuel Porsche involves the production of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water, using renewable energy sources such as solar energy or wind energy. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from the air, using a chemical process called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, to produce a range of liquid hydrocarbons, including gasoline and synthetic diesel. The production of synthetic diesel could provide a sustainable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional diesel, as it can reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, synthetic diesel can be used in existing diesel vehicles without the need for significant engine modifications, which can facilitate the transition to the use of renewable fuels for transportation.

For now, synthetic eFuels are far from large-scale adoption. At the moment they cannot be bought from any gas station and the factories that produce these e-fuels are still in the experimental phase. For example, the car rental office of Alfa Rent a Car Cluj informs you that Porsche has invested about 100 million euros in a synthetic fuel plant in Chile where 130 thousand liters of e-fuel are currently being produced per year only used to fuel the Porsche 911 GT3 race cars in the Mobil 1 Super Cup. Porsche says it will increase production to 55 million liters per year by 2026 and after that it plans to increase it 10 times by the year 2028. It seems like a lot, but the reality contradicts us because the USA alone consumes over 500 billion liters of fuel per year, which means over 1.3 billion per day. Practically, almost 10 thousand plants like the one in Chile will be needed when they are working at full capacity in the year 2028, just to meet the fuel needs of the American market.

There would be another problem, synthetic fuels are carbon neutral only if the electricity used to obtain them comes from zero-emission renewable energy sources. This is why Porsche chose the country of Chile for the construction of the factory, it chose an area where the wind blows 270 days a year and is strong enough to spin the wind turbines that produce the electricity that the factory uses to get the hydrogen from water and combine it with carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. Of course, other energy sources can be used to obtain eFuels, such as hydroelectric energy from dams or solar energy from solar panels. The latter may be very attractive to major oil producers such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia when demand for fossil fuels declines. Saudi Arabia enjoys 340 hours of sunshine during the summer months while Europe only gets 220 hours.

Nothing changes overnight and electric cars aren't going away either. These new EU regulations will lead to increased production of e-fuels in the coming years and this means that some of today's flagship cars and some car manufacturers will not disappear from the market unless they can afford to switch their entire production to electric cars by 2035. These changes leave the door open for those people whose jobs or lifestyles are not compatible with electric cars. From now on we will only talk about electric cars and e-fuels.

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