E-Fuels are Not Economically Beneficial

Name:
Course Code:
Date:
Why E-fuels are Not Economically Beneficial
One of the main sources of energy anywhere in the world today is fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have increasingly led to carbonization of the atmosphere leading to adverse weather effects and climate change. Carbon in the atmosphere leads to global warming, and there is a lurking danger to the planet that if necessary and adequate steps are not taken to reduce carbon emissions, soon the planet may reach a point of no return. Carbon has increasingly been accumulating in the atmosphere since the industrial age and has already led to a rise in the average global temperature by over 1.5 degrees. The world is scrambling to ensure that it does not reach 3 degrees. One of the main pollutants of the atmosphere is fossil fuels which have become the backbone of human civilization and modernity. Fossil fuels are extracted deep from the ground, where they have been locked for millions of years and burned to provide energy. Fossil fuels present two main problems to human civilization; first, they are non-renewable. This means that they will be depleted some day, and then the world and if other sustainable energy sources are not developed early, it could spell disaster for humanity. Secondly, they are heavy atmospheric pollutants. To produce energy, they need to be burned, where they produce carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is an environmental pollutant and one of the leading causes of global warming.
Therefore, there has been a need to create alternative sources of energy to supplement fossil fuels and eventually replace them. One of these technologies is creating of e-fuels. E-fuels are produced by using electricity to electrolyze water and using carbon to create hydrocarbon fuels. The process entails using electricity to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbon fuel. The fuel is then synthesized in Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process to create a synthetic hydrocarbon. It is later refined to meet industry standards for the relevant application. The fuel properties are adjusted to meet the required specifications.
However, this process is not economically beneficial for several reasons. Firstly, they have high production costs. Most of the technology involved in the production of e-fuels is expensive. It requires multiple steps, mostly of expensive technologies, to extract hydrogen and combine it with carbon dioxide CITATION Jus23 \l 1033 (Calma). Secondly, the resultant product ought to be refined for use, which adds to the complexity of producing e-fuels. Thirdly, the process is energy intensive because it requires electricity for electrolysis and nearly all the other processes involved in production. Even when the electricity is sourced from renewable sources, the cost of installing renewable sources of energy is not insignificant. Therefore, for each unit produced, there is some unit of electricity that was used. This is unlike fossil fuels which are just extracted and refined before being released into the market. The current costs of producing a unit of e-fuel are relatively higher than producing a similar unit of fossil fuel product with similar chemical properties and energy. Therefore, e-fuels are more expensive than traditional fuels, and it will take some time before they are competitive in the market.
Secondly, the process of producing e-fuels has relatively lower energy efficiency than that of fossil fuels. On average, 48% of renewable electricity used to convert e-fuels into liquid is lost along the process, while up to 70% of the fuel's energy is lost upon combustion CITATION Jor23 \l 1033 (Liboreiro). Fossil fuels are the energy standards, and for any new product to dislodge the centuries’ old energy sources, it ought to be more energy efficient. E-fuels lose their energy efficiency because they require significantly high amounts of energy to produce, which reduce the overall efficiency of the resultant fuels. For each unit of e-fuel, there are units of energy used in production, which increases the cost of production and reduces the profit margins. In some cases, it is rather far more efficient to use the energy used in production to power electric cars and other forms of transportation t...