ABC News looks at solutions to problems related to climate change and the environment with its series “The Power of Us: People, The Climate, and Our Future.”
While the share of electric vehicles in the auto market continues to grow, the pace at which Americans are purchasing new electric vehicles appears to be slowing. Kelley Blue Book reports that just under 270,000 EVs were sold in the first quarter of this year. Although that is almost 3% more than in the first quarter of 2023, it is significantly lower than in the last quarter of last year.
“Something I want to say is that electric cars are for the patient,” says Oleksiy Golub, who has been driving electric since 2020. He currently drives a Hyundai Ioniq 6. Although he likes the car, it is not without its frustrations: most of them have to do with 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 ended up not charging their vehicle because the technology was malfunctioning or out of service. While there have since been federal investments in public charging infrastructure, with resulting improvements, Golub says public charging stations can still be finicky and busy.
“If there’s one or two people in front of you, instead of standing there at the charger for half an hour and forty minutes, you stay there two or three times,” he says.
That can make long-distance travel impractical, like when Golub tried to drive his previous EV, an older Hyundai Ioniq, from Philadelphia to Denver.
“I stopped seventeen times on that trip, forty minutes to an hour each, and twelve of those times were at a Walmart,” he tells ABC Audio, adding as a result, “I know how to get around a Walmart if the back of my hand has to come.”
Golub considers himself an early adopter of electric cars, someone willing to deal with the frustrations that new technology brings. But more mainstream consumers generally have a lower tolerance for these frustrations.
In March, the Biden administration announced new Environmental Protection Agency regulations for vehicle emissions that are less aggressive than the agency’s original proposal last year. They also give automakers more time to achieve these 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 combines electric motors with traditional gas engines. But others have focused on making the gas-powered vehicles already on the road greener.
Ralf Diemer is the CEO of the eFuel Alliance, a collective of approximately 180 companies focused on advocating for liquid fuels developed in a carbon-neutral manner.
“The end product is actually, if you take the example of gasoline, a gasoline that you can use in any current car on the road,” says Diemer.
Diemer says eFuels work the same way as existing gasoline and diesel fuel: It can be transported in tanker trucks to gas stations, where drivers can fill up and run their cars as if they were using traditional gas.
Meg Gentile is Executive Director of the Board of Directors of HIF Global, a company that operates the world’s first functional eFuels facility in southern Chile, itself part of the eFuels Alliance. She tells ABC Audio that the recipe for making an eFuel starts with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom: namely water.
“Water is H2O, and it actually separates 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 flows through two panels with a metal plate that conducts electricity well, and then that electricity separates the molecule,” she says.
This produces hydrogen gas – the first ingredient in the eFuel recipe. Gentile says the next step is harvesting carbon from the atmosphere using renewable electricity: “We’re just going to take it out of the air, because there’s carbon dioxide in our air.”
Finally, HIF Global combines the hydrogen and carbon molecules to create a hydrocarbon.
“Hydrocarbon is also called fossil fuels, or basically all the fuels we use today in our cars, planes and ships,” says Gentile.
The goal, however, is to make hydrocarbon fuel so that the pollutants released when burned can be captured and converted into more fuel, Gentile says.
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“They are considered carbon neutral because we have captured CO2. We also re-emit the CO2 because the engine works in exactly the same way, but we are not putting any new emissions into the atmosphere,” she says.
According to Diemer, this is important, because the cars, planes and ships that are currently in use are probably not going anywhere anytime soon.
“Most [the cars on the road] We have combustion engines,” he says. “They won’t go away overnight, which means you need a solution, at least in the short term.”
Kelley Blue Book reported last year that the average car on American roads is now twelve and a half years old, while boats have been in use for even longer on average. Advocates like Diemer say that while the broader transportation industry figures out a way to stop burning hydrocarbon fuels altogether, eFuel could make existing vehicles more environmentally friendly, either by blending eFuels with traditional gasoline or replacing it entirely.
But Diemer also notes that it is not that simple. First, eFuel is difficult to obtain. HIF Global’s facility in southern Chile is currently the only one of its kind, selling only to Porsche, another member of the eFuel Alliance.
Additionally, eFuel is expensive, at least for now, costing between twelve and fifteen dollars per gallon, according to Diemer.
“I like to think of double the cost of gasoline today by up to an order of magnitude more,” said Dr. Ian Rowe, division director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. .
Another challenge for eFuel that Rowe cites is whether the energy used to make it is truly green, as proponents claim.
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“eFuels require a lot of renewable electricity, and until we can really deploy the amount of renewable electricity needed to make this feasible, it’s just not going to make much of a dent,” he tells ABC Audio.
Diemer says this could all change as more companies invest in new technology, build out production facilities and blend eFuel into the existing fossil fuel supply chain. But for that, companies would have to take the investment risk.
“It’s about how to overcome the risks and problems of first movers,” says Diemer. “Then the challenge is of course to really initiate the major investments to achieve scale effects in this production.”
Rowe adds that the cost of eFuels at the moment, plus the lack of investment in getting them up and running on a large scale, means they don’t really make sense for use in normal combustion engine cars.
“I would say it’s very difficult to see a scenario where eFuels can be widely deployed to cater to, for example, the light sector,” says Rowe. “However, I think there is a reasonable path to meeting some of our tough needs.”
That means using eFuels to fuel things like passenger planes and cargo ships. But Rowe says this will only happen if governments develop policies to incentivize the big companies that operate these vehicles.
“Basically, we need to make sure we have policies in place that can accept eFuels as soon as they are ready to hit the market,” he says.
There is already some movement on this front. Both Rowe and Diemer cite the stimulus and tax breaks included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by President Biden 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 will really be needed is a convergence of these technologies learning how to scale up, the deployment of renewable electricity and the creation of policies that can support them,” says Rowe.
Listen to the full story below on ABC Audio’s Perspective podcast.
The Power of Us: As demand for electric vehicles wanes, a new alternative fuel is turning heads. This originally appeared on abcnews.go.com