by ABC News is looking at solutions to issues related to climate change and the environment with the series, “The Power of Us: People, The Climate, and Our Future”.
Although electric vehicles’ share of the auto market is still growing, the rate at which Americans are buying new electric vehicles appears to be slowing. Kelley’s Blue Book reports that just under 270,000 EVs were sold in the first quarter of this year. While that’s up almost 3% from the first quarter of 2023, it’s down significantly from the last quarter of last year.
“What I will say is that electric vehicles are for the patient,” says Oleksiy Golub, who has driven EVs since 2020. Currently, he drives a Hyundai Ioniq 6. He says that although he likes the car, it is not without its frustration, most of them involve charging.
A 2022 JD Power survey of more than eleven thousand EV and plug-in hybrid owners found that 20% of drivers who visited a public charging station did not charge their vehicle due to the technology malfunctioning or being out of service . While the public charging infrastructure has seen federal investment since then, and improvements as a result, Golub says public charging stations can still be scarce — and crowded.
“If there are one or two people in front of you, instead of waiting for a charger for half an hour, 40 minutes, you stay there for a period of two or three,” he says.
That can make long-distance travel practical, like when Golub tried to drive his previous EV, an older Hyundai Ioniq, from Philadelphia to Denver.
“I stopped during that trip seventeen times, forty minutes to an hour each, and twelve of those times were at Walmart,” he tells ABC Audio, adding as a result, “I know how to get around Walmart like the back. out of my hand.”
Golub considers himself an early EV adopter, one willing to deal with some of the frustrations that come with the new technology. But mainstream consumers tend to have a lower tolerance for such frustrations.
In March, the Biden administration announced new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on vehicle emissions, which are less aggressive than the agency’s original proposal from last year. They also allow more time for automakers to reach those goals.
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Automakers like Ford and General Motors have said they are using the extra time to reinvest in hybrid technology, which pairs electric motors with traditional gas engines. But others focused on how to make the gas-burning vehicles already on the road greener.
Ralf Diemer is the CEO of the eFuel Alliance, a conglomerate of around 180 companies dedicated to supporting liquid fuel developed in a carbon-neutral way.
“The end product is actually, if you take the gasoline example, it’s gasoline you can use in any current car on the road,” says Diemer.
Diemer says eFuels works the same way current gasoline and diesel do: it can be transported in tanker trucks to gas stations, where drivers can fill up and run their cars the same way if they were using conventional gas.
Meg Gentile is the executive director on the board of HIF Global, a company that runs the world’s first functional eFuels facility in southern Chile, and is part of the eFuels Alliance itself. She tells ABC Audio that the recipe for making e-fuel starts with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom: that is, water.
“The water is H2O, and it’s basically separating the H from the O,” Gentile says of the process, which uses an electrolyzer, which Gentile describes as a large metal machine about the size of a door.
“The water passes through two panels that have a sheet of metal that is a good conductor of electricity, and then that electricity separates the molecule from each other,” she says.
This produces hydrogen gas – the first ingredient in the eFuel recipe. Gentile says the next step is to remove carbon from the atmosphere using renewable electricity: “We’re going to take it from the air, because we have carbon dioxide in our air.”
Finally, HIF Global combines the hydrogen and carbon molecules to form a hydrocarbon.
“Fossil fuels are also called hydrocarbons or, basically, all the fuels we use today in our cars, planes and ships,” says Gentile.
However, the goal is to create hydrocarbon fuel in such a way that the pollutants emitted when it is burned can be recaptured and made into more fuel, Gentile says.
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“They are considered carbon neutral because we captured CO2, we also re-emit the CO2 because the engine works in the same way, but we are not putting any new emissions into the atmosphere,” he says she
That’s important, according to Diemer, because the cars, planes and ships currently in use probably aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Most of it [the cars on the road] have combustion engines,” he says. “They’re not going to go away overnight, which means you’d need a solution, at least in the short term.”
Kelley Blue Book reported last year that the average car on American roads is now two and a half years old, and boats, on average, are in use even longer. Advocates like Diemer say that while the broader transportation industry offers a way to stop burning hydrocarbon fuels altogether, eFuel could make existing vehicles more environmentally friendly, by mixing e-Fuels with conventional gasoline or by completely replacing them.
But Diemer also notes that it’s not that simple. For one, eFuel is hard to come by. HIF Global’s facility in southern Chile is currently the only one of its kind, and it only sells to Porsche, another member of the eFuel Alliance.
Also, eFuel is expensive, at least so far, costing between twelve and fifteen dollars a gallon, according to Diemer.
“I like to think it’s anywhere from twice the cost of gasoline today to as much as an order of magnitude more,” says Dr. Ian Rowe, division director for the Department’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. US Energy. .
Another challenge for eFuel that Rowe mentions is whether the energy used to make it is really green, as advocates argue.
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“eFuels requires a lot of renewable electricity, and until we can actually deploy the amount of renewable electricity needed to make this possible, it’s not going to make a huge dent,” a he tells ABC Audio.
Diemer says that could change as more companies invest in new technology, build out production facilities, and mix eFuel into the existing fossil fuel supply chain. But that would require companies to take the investment risk.
“It’s about how to overcome first-mover risks and problems,” says Diemer. “Then, of course, the challenge is to encourage the large investment to achieve the effects of scale in this production.”
Rowe also says that the current cost of eFuels, as well as the lack of investment to get them up and running at scale, means they don’t make sense for use in conventional internal combustion cars.
“I would say it’s very difficult to see a case where e-Fuel could be deployed on a large scale to serve something like the light duty sector,” says Rowe. “However, I think there is a reasonable path to meet some of our heavy duty needs.”
That means using e-Fuels to power things like passenger jets and cargo ships. But Rowe says that will only happen if governments devise policies to incentivize the big companies that operate these vehicles.
“Basically, we need to ensure that there is a ready policy that could accept eFuels when they are ready to reach the market,” he says.
Some movement has already been made on this front. Rowe and Diemer both point to incentives and tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2022, as a step in the right direction. But Rowe says more needs to be done, at the highest levels of government and industry.
“What’s really going to be needed is the community of these technologies learning how to scale up, the use of renewable electricity, and policy coming into place that can support them,” says Rowe.
Listen to the full story on the ABC Audio Perspective podcast, below.
The Power of Us: As EV demand dwindles, new alternative fuel gets attention appeared first on abcnews.go.com
