Following the success of its pilot project in Chile, HIF Global has been given the green light to build the world’s largest e-fuels production facility in Matagorda, in southern Texas. Construction is set to begin in 2024.
HIF Global is a Chilean company that started a pilot facility in Haru Oni. The 2,600 liters (687 gallons) of e-fuel it produced were all sent to Porsche, for its one-make racing series in Germany last year.
“In Texas, we are taking e-fuels to the next level of commercial scale, and we are now permitted to construct the largest e-fuels facility in the world, to produce approximately 200 million gallons [750 million liters] per year of shipping fuel, and e-gasoline,” said Meg Gentle, the executive director of the board for HIF Global.
Read: Germany And EU Agree To Protect Internal Combustion Engines After 2035 With E-Fuels
The company expects to be able to produce that amount of e-fuel by 2027, per hydrogeninsight.com. To make it, HIF Global will need 300,000 tons of green hydrogen per year, and roughly 2 million tons of “recycled carbon dioxide.”
The ingredients are then combined to make 1.4 million tons of methanol, which can be used in the chemical industry and as shipping fuel. Alternatively, it can be further refined and turned into an e-fuel for passenger vehicles.
HIF Global has not yet revealed where it will get the CO2, the hydrogen, or the energy to run the plant, but the challenges of sourcing it all are one of the points of criticism for the industry. Producing e-fuels is highly energy intensive.
Whereas 77 percent of the electricity produced by a power plant (be it renewable or not) goes to the wheels of an EV, just 13 percent of the energy goes to the road when it’s spent synthesizing e-fuels, according to Transport and Environment.
Critics argue that what little green energy we have is better spent on EVs than combustion vehicles. They add that the e-fuels should be spent making industries that can’t go electric (long distance shipping and flying) greener, rather than passenger vehicles.
The high energy cost also means that e-fuels are expensive. The fuel coming from Haru Oni cost about €50 per liter, or about $200 per gallon. This plant, and its economies of scale, should help drive prices down, though. HIF Global believes that once e-fuels are being produced at an industrial scale, prices could fall to around €2 per liter, or $8.51 per gallon.
