Chief executive officer of BMW, Oliver Zipse has said that the plan by the European Union to ban sales of new combustion-engined cars from 2035 is the wrong approach, and has called for the expediting of e-fuels roll-out, reported Autocar.
Current legislation in the European Union will see the banning of new ICE-powered car sales, unless they are run solely on carbon-neutral fuels such as e-fuels. Zipse has called for the European Commission to accelerate the viability of e-fuels in order to make their use practical by 2035, or else legislation in the region “would be a deliberate ban on combustion engines through the back door,” he said.
This is a “bogus solution”, said Zipse, adding that “a [categorical] ban on combustion engines in 2035 is the wrong approach.” However, the production of e-fuels demands a substantial amount of energy as its requires ‘green’ hydrogen, which is made by electrolysing water by using renewable electricity.
However, a 2019 report by the International Energy Agency stated that producing all of today’s industrial hydrogen output from electricity would create an electricity demand of 3,600TWh, or 1,000 TWh more than the entire EU’s energy production in 2022, when just 39.4% came from renewables. This figure was only to match today’s hydrogen output, and not the surplus required to mass-industrialise e-fuels, according to Autocar.
Brand compatriot Porsche has invested US$75 million in carbon-neutral fuels producer HIF Global to jointly develop production of e-fuels, and the sports car maker has deployed bio-based renewable fuel for the Porsche Supercup one-make racing series.
Separately, Ferrari has also voiced support for carbon-neutral fuels, as Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna has said that “there is still a viable way forward for ICE cars.”
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