Those of you who attended the British Grand Prix would possibly have enjoyed watching David Brabham demonstrate a 1972 McLaren M19, driven at the time by Denny Hulme and Peter Revson.
Those few laps with the bark of the Cosworth DFV bouncing across the landscape were a delightful auditory and visual memory lane for older fans. But it really represented something potentially significant for the future. Because this DFV ran on completely artificial electronic fuel, manufactured in Bicester by the Zero company that recently sponsors the Sauber team. You may remember that two years ago Sebastian Vettel demonstrated his own 1992 Williams FW14B, also at the British Grand Prix, using renewable fuel. But it was biofuel. The McLaren M19 was supplied with e-fuel and there is one important difference. Biofuels are made from agricultural food reserves and, in particular, second-generation biofuels use waste instead of commodities. E-fuel, on the other hand, is manufactured using a completely different process.
What we will likely see in F1 2026 will be biofuels produced by the existing giant petrochemical corporations and, regulations permitting e-fuels, this is a more advanced level of commercial growth than biofuels.
Paddy Lowe, who was instrumental in creating the active driving formula of this Williams FW14B in the 1990s, is one of the founding partners of the Zero e-fuel company. He was at Silverstone and explained some of the background to the fuel that powers this old McLaren.
F1 is set to use sustainable fuel until 2026 but, thanks to Mercedes’ former technical lead Paddy Lowe’s Zero Petroleum, it is already being used elsewhere.
“We manufacture electronic fuels by reversing the combustion process. When a hydrocarbon such as gas or diesel is burned, water and carbon dioxide are created. It is oxygen added to hydrogen and carbon. What we do is hydrogen from water by electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. It wants to use renewable electrical energy in electrolysis to convert it into a renewable process. This can be solar, hydroelectric, wind or thermonuclear. Then you collect carbon dioxide from the air. We synthesize them in combination to create a breeding fuel.
The procedure is known as petrosynthesis, and several companies, mainly in the United States, are embarking on its manufacture on an exploratory scale. What Zero production has is that it produces a high-octane fuel on-site without the need for a refinery. .
“Biogasoline is great,” Lowe continues, “as long as it doesn’t deplete food production. [That’s why] it’s not enough to upgrade fossil fuels if you do the math. This is the difference with electronic fuels. The prospects for production are unlimited; It’s just a matter of building the team. You can upgrade all the fossil fuels that are used today through this process.
“If 6% of Australia’s land area were committed to a solar farm, all the fossil fuels needed on Earth would be produced, in a completely sustainable way. In the coming decades, it will be unimaginable to be able to extract these tissues from the planet. Why would you do that when it’s hard and I’d charge you more and you can’t necessarily do it on your own turf?
At the moment, generating e-fuel is much more expensive than extracting it from the ground, of course. It requires enormous capital investment to manufacture water-gas reverse conversion reactors (which convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide) and Foscher-Tropsch reactors (which convert the aggregate of carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquids) at the required scale. But as with any new technology, it would be less expensive as production increased.
“In just 10 years, the value of e-fuel will be about the same as fossil fuels, and then it will be cheaper,” says Lowe. “Twenty years ago, wind power and force was a far-fetched concept on a small scale. Now, the cheapest power plant that can be built in the UK would be an offshore wind farm, not a power plant fueled by gas. It was not something that anyone would have predicted 20 years ago. That way, the generation will come and come quickly.
“The COP 28 [UN climate change] agreement established for the first time in black and white that the world will have to move absolutely away from fossil fuels. This is the direction to take. Very often, F1 is a pioneer in the generation’s evolution towards commercialisation. Our next step at Zero is to scale commercially, but we want business partners and a suitable location. Around 20% of our engineers are former F1 engineers, in addition to many of our senior team principals. The way we work is becoming more and more like an F1 team, in the sense that we are moving forward in this generation at very high speed with many of the techniques implemented in F1. »
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