Can e-fuels replace fossil fuels for a future global sustainable transport?

Abstract

The use of synthetic fuels is an attractive solution to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions where electrification proves to be challenging or too cost intensive. Combining the use of renewable electricity to produce electrolytic hydrogen and sustainable carbon (e.g. from non-crop-based biomass) offers a promising route for large-scale, low carbon power-to-X-products (PtX). While the process technology is pretty mature, the energy efficiency, the production costs, the GHG savings and the possible production capacity is a part of the political debate. Rigorous chemical process simulation using standard software like Aspen Plus with experimentally validated unit performance data is the basis to get an exact representation of the entire process. Chemical engineering cost estimation is applied to predict net production costs (NPC) of PtX-products for transport fuels. A life cycle assessment (LCA) is performed with the open source framework Brightway2 using the same data set of rigorous process simulation. Costs and GWP where calculated using the in-house tool Techno-Economic Process Evaluation Tool (TEPET).