– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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People answered a lot of technical items about how yes, it’s totally possible to produce fuels. But technical reasons aren’t the only driving factor. Economics is another one, but also important is regulatory factors.
One of the things we talk about in automotive is the “life cycle” – aka how much emissions are produced when you operate a car. There’s several different ways to perform the life cycle analysis, including where you say the life cycle begins and ends. Let’s talk about two of the relevant ones, “tank to wheel” and “well to wheel”. In tank to wheel, we look at the amount of emissions that occur when operating the vehicle (i.e. what happens when you have fuel in the tank and make power out of it, to spin the wheels). In well to wheel, we look at the same thing, but we also add the amount of emissions that came from producing the fuel itself. Obviously, this is more complicated.
In a tank to wheel analysis, it doesn’t matter what your source of fuel is – it could be miracle fuel that fell from the sky or the most inefficiently produced gasoline ever. As long as it’s the same fuel and burned in the same car, the result is the same. However, in a well to wheel analysis, those are obviously different. So why wouldn’t we use a well to wheel analysis to determine regulations? Because it’s very difficult to do and do a good job at it.
What does this mean for regulations? It means that EPA and CARB, so far, have declined to regulate based on well to wheel analysis. Instead, they choose to regulate these two processes (creating the fuel, whether synthetically or from dead dinosaurs, and the burning of those fuels to drive your vehicle) separately. So an automaker gets no credit for a vehicle that is net-zero in carbon emissions (i.e. if you used 100% renewable energy to create the fuel and then you burn it, in the simplest terms, it’s net-zero). Of course there’s other stuff involved and the analysis is more complex but this is supposed to be simplified… Instead, even if you use really “clean” fuel, your car is just as “dirty” as if it were burning dead dinosaurs. (Also remember that there are other emissions besides CO2, like NOx, which is not helped by using green synthetic fuels.)
If you don’t get any credit for making a green fuel in terms of CO2 reduction, what incentive do you have to actually make that fuel, other than that it’s good for the environment? Well, given that it’s much more expensive to make fuel from sunlight than from digging it up out of the ground, you don’t really have any. Governments would have to step in and subsidize these green fuels in order to make them economically viable. So far, that is not really feasible as we’re still working on just the renewable energy and hydrogen production at this point, which are all precursors to actually making synthetic gasoline. And still, remember those pesky NOx and other emissions!
SO! What let’s summarize:
1. The CO2 emission reduction in creating synthetic fuels from renewable energy is not captured in automotive emissions regulations.
2. It is expensive to produce these fuels and without subsidies*, and without getting any credit for carbon reduction, there’s very little incentive economically to make these fuels.
3. Burning synthetic hydrocarbons does not eliminate the issue of criteria emissions (which is what CARB calls emissions like NOx, NMOG, etc.).
When asked directly, CARB has stated that they want to drive the industry to ZEV as quickly as possible and they feel “allowing” synthetic fuels to become a major factor would delay that push and they don’t want that.
* It’s entirely possible there are subsidies for synthetic fuel generation that I’m not aware of but it’s clearly not enough to make it economically viable.
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