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Could Audi’s E-diesel Be The Answer To The Carbon Crisis?

Could Audi’s E-diesel Be The Answer To The Carbon Crisis?

With growing demand for eco-friendly vehicles and ever-heightening fuel costs, car manufacturers are moving more and more toward more sustainably-powered alternatives.

For a lot of companies, this means turning to electricity. But ever since the first electric car came out nearly two hundred years ago, electric has been known for its limitations. Not least the short distance ranges, the infrastructure needed to power vehicles, and the fact it requires the design of completely new engines.

Audi, however, is taking a different approach. Since 2014, they’ve been working with energy technology corporation Sunfire in developing a synthetic e-diesel. And more recently, they’ve partied with two other companies to build a factory — work is planned to start in early 2018 — where it can start producing the fuel and bringing it to the masses.

What makes Audi’s e-diesel so different?

The biggest problem of fuels like petrol and diesel is how much carbon they emit into the atmosphere during their production and use. Audi’s e-diesel, however, claims to be ‘almost’ carbon neutral. The fuel is made through a process that runs on completely surplus energy obtained from hydropower, and actually uses, rather than emits, carbon dioxide.

Making the fuel begins with the process of electrolysis to extract hydrogen from water.

Hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that would otherwise contribute to global warming, to form ‘hydrocarbon chains’.

These long-chain hydrocarbons make up the basis of the fuel and are separated to make the e-diesel and other waxes, which can be sold on and/or used in other areas of industry. To make the process even more carbon-friendly, excess heat from its production is syphoned into the surrounding residential area or other industries to heat homes and factories.

As electric vehicles need appropriate infrastructure and run on limited batteries, Audi believe their e-diesel could fill a more immediate need for a fuel that can power vehicles long range, while being compatible with existing infrastructure and engines.

But the fact is, the synthetic fuel could also be much more feasible and sustainable than electricity. Particularly as it makes use of the millions of existing combustion-engine cars and would provide consumers with a way to reduce their carbon-footprint without needing to upgrade to relatively costly electric vehicles.

Although Audi expects to start building the factory in early 2018, it plans to be delivering the e-diesel within the year. Its plan for the facility is to produce 105,669 gallons of fuel per year, and no doubt, if successful, to build other factories and help accelerate the eradication of fossil fuels.

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