Europe’s EV push nearly faltered over fringe fuels that are years away

It sounds inconceivable that Europe’s plan to usher in the age of electric vehicles almost went awry because of a prohibitively expensive technology that’s virtually unavailable, but that’s exactly what happened.

For several weeks last month, Germany refused to back the European Union’s effective ban of new combustion-engine cars from 2035, demanding that Brussels protect vehicles running on e-fuels. Given the auto industry employs around 786,000 people in Germany, it’s understandable that Berlin would try to protect jobs threatened by the phasing out of engines. Still, the fight for e-fuels made little sense.

Analysts doubt that the synthetic fuels will ever make a meaningful contribution to the industry achieving carbon neutrality. Only 2% of the EU car fleet can fully run on e-fuels in 2035, the lobby group Transport & Environment said in October, citing industry forecasts. Many argue the scarce supply of e-fuels that are years away would be better put to use by sectors that can’t transition to battery power as easily, such as aviation and shipping.

One of the biggest inhibitors is cost. E-fuels are made using renewable electricity to split hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon, an inefficient and expensive process. Synthetic diesel costs between $3.50 and $7 a liter to produce, according to BloombergNEF estimates — about four to seven times the price of traditional diesel in the European wholesale market.

Even after years of scaling up production, e-fuels for passenger cars probably will remain around four times more expensive than fossil-fuel gasoline, while improvements in battery technologies will make EVs more affordable and enhance their performance, LMC Automotive’s Al Bedwell wrote in a blog post last month.

Gerrit Marx, the CEO of Italian truck and bus maker Iveco, last week called the technology “the champagne of propulsion” that makes sense only for a small group of wealthy individuals who’d like to hang on to their combustion luxury and performance cars.