E-Fuels - a liquid battery
There is no doubt that we need to turn our way of living to achieve carbon neutrality on our planet - the faster the better. While the ultimate goal is clear, the way to get there is rather complex due to the extreme variety of sources that emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Aviation - accounting for approx. 3% of global CO2 emission - is certainly one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonize.?
?Aviation will grow, whether we like it or not
Over the last decades, the global aviation market has grown 4-5% annually to 4,5 billion passengers in 2019. Of course there is a share of unnecessary flights that should be avoided. However, while we see intense political debates how we could potentially reduce or even stop flying, we should not forget, that not even 20% of the world population has ever flown on an aircraft. The remaining 80% will start flying sooner or later, whether we like it or not. More and more people are escaping extreme poverty and are building up middle class communities - in Eastern Europe, China, India, Africa, Latin America and other places on our planet. And as they grow their spendable income, they will start traveling by overproportionally using airplanes. Why? Because they largely live in regions with poor road and rail infrastructure and flying is the easiest way to get from A to B, much more than in Europe or in the US. So growth in those regions will certainly outgrow all efforts to reduce flying in high income countries.
Besides lets?not forget the enormous benefits of flying. Connecting societies facilitates a peaceful planet. Connecting economies in a globalized world enables our way of living in the developed countries and it brings a lot of jobs and income to less developed regions of the world and helps billions of people to make their living.
Carbon neutral flying is possible
Electric flying of large passenger aircraft is still decades away because of high battery weight. The energy density of a high performance battery is still a factor 50-100 lower that fuel. So if you want to replace the 100 tons of kerosene needed for a longhaul flight, you would (theoretically) need 5.000-10.000 tons of battery - obviously impossible to carry for an aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight of 300 tons... So there is no alternative at hand to replace burning kerosene in a jet engine.
There is no physical law why fuel has to be fossile
Refinering crude oil is the easiest and cheapest way to create jet fuel kerosene. However, there are many more ways to produce kerosene. After all fuel is a hydrocarbon, so you "just" need to combine carbon and hydrogen to the right molecules. Crude oil is already nearly there, so you need only little chemical optimization - but burning it increases the CO2 level in the atmosphere as it comes from a fossile source.
The story of CO2 balance is totally different, if the carbon comes from a renewable source such as plants or directly from the atmosphere. Those fuels burns without adding new CO2 to the atmosphere.
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From Power to liquid
The most climate friendly way to create sustainable kerosene is to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with green hydrogen and electricity and process it down to kerosene, that you can use in any standard jet engine. Factually, this is a liquid battery!
However production needs a lot of energy! In fact you need to reverse the burning process. It starts with the production of hydrogen through electrolysis of water (needs power) and subsequently runs through several synthesis steps that take their share of energy. In the end, the synthetic kerosene contains 30-40% of the energy that you have inserted during the entire process. By the way, that's also the reason, why synthetic fuels should only be used for those sectors, where no technological alternative is available. And as any other electricity based technology, it only becomes green if the electricity has been produced in a carbon neutral way. Renewable sources like water, wind and sun (or nuclear power plants) can and need to provide this.
Governments need to pave the way
While the technological processes are clear, it's still a long way to go to industry scale production. Today synthetic fuels are only available from demonstration plants and at "farmacy prices", they cost 5-10 times more than fossile fuels. For sure these prices will come down, once industrial production has been scaled up. And hopefully one day the price premium of synthetic kerosene matches the market price for CO2 certificates, making it globally competitive to use. But until then, there is a risk of stepping into the chicken-egg-trap: Producers can't afford to invest billions into setting up their plants unless they are confident, that airlines will buy their synthetic kerosene despite the high price premium. At the same time airlines can't afford to pay billions of extra costs for synthetic kerosene as long as their competitors from other regions of this world still use cheap fossile based kerosene.?
This is why governments need to step in by doing two things: 1) They need to enforce an increasing compulsory quota for synthetic kerosene, just as the European Commission has proposed it as part of their "FitFot55" green deal. 2) They need to subsidize it to a price level where a distortion of competition with airlines from other regions of the world is avoided. This subsidy can and must run out, once the price of synthetic kerosene matches the price of fossile kerosene plus the price of the CO2 certificates (provided all airlines have to buy CO2 certificates, if they burn fossile kerosene). In a way this is comparable to the support governments are giving to the market introduction of solar panels, wind mills, hydrogen infrastructure or electric cars.
We can do it!
Flying can and has to become sustainable, we have the technological solutions at our hand. Let's not waste our time and energy in symbolic debates around short distance flights (that account only for 4% of the CO2 emission of airlines) or populistic attempts to make flying redundant that will both be unsuccessful and harmful for your societies. Let's embrace technology to do things that really save CO2 emission and ultimately save our planet!
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Specialist Geotechnical Engineer at Anglo American
1 年Interesting stuff Alexis. Some acknowledgement should be made to the physical and logistic challenges/limits associated with e-fuels generally. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/41622#:~:text=E%2DFuels%20%7C%20Encyclopedia%20MDPI&text=Power%2Dto%2DX%20(PtX,ammonia%2C%20or%20e%2Ddiesel.
Captain B 777/787 bei Austrian Airlines mit Expertise in Executive Management
3 年Alles gesagt. Top!
European Economic and Social Committee , Brussels
3 年???? LG
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3 年Thank you for