CO2-based e-fuels become much easier to study thanks to new technique

Simply replacing petrol and diesel with synthetic fuel is of course tempting. The old oil heating system can continue to run, and car and air traffic would not have to be extensively converted.

However, the cost of producing these e-fuels is currently so high that an e-car could drive ten times as far with the same amount of energy. Especially as the quantities of fossil fuels currently burned are so huge that it seems almost impossible to replace them completely.

And yet the energy density of these SynFuels alone, which is almost 20 times higher than the best batteries currently available, would be a good argument for driving research forward. If this results in a method of capturing energy peaks in wind and solar power and using them sensibly, all the better.

The Swiss research institute Empa is working on a new method to make synthetic fuels usable after all. This means that the energy efficiency during production must be drastically increased, while the process itself must be kept as simple as possible.

Basically, only water, CO2 and energy are required. The crucial question, however, is which catalyst in which quantity with which electrode and its specific properties at which pressure and temperature promises the greatest success.

From these endless possibilities, an automatic test set-up was created, in which ten experiments for the production of e-fuels or synfuels are currently taking place simultaneously. This means that experiments can be carried out not only in continuous operation, but also at ten times the speed.

The data is made available immediately so that every other research facility has access to it and can reproduce the most promising methods for producing synthetic fuels. The project can be found on Github.

If the open source project is successful, this would certainly be a further building block towards becoming CO2-neutral more quickly, especially in the area of heat generation. This is because combustion engines, whether in cars, ships or airplanes, are actually too inefficient, regardless of the high energy density of the fuel.