A looming British ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine cars was thrown into chaos on Tuesday after Brussels watered down its own restrictions amid opposition from the German auto industry. The Telegraph has more.
Experts and politicians warned that British rules due to take effect in 2030 are untenable following the European climbdown, which will allow internal combustion engines as long as they burn carbon-neutral petrol alternatives.
The European Union will now ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2035 but permit these so-called e-fuels following a backroom compromise forced on it by the German authorities and signed off on Tuesday night.
Sources suggested that Whitehall was considering following the Commission’s lead by also allowing an e-fuel exemption. British carmakers Aston Martin and McLaren are already understood to be examining e-fuels as an option for powering future models.
Critics of the Government’s Net Zero plans seized on the European Union’s decision as evidence that a total policy rethink is needed, while campaigners including Greenpeace have said that it could slow down electric vehicle adoption. …
The former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said: “The 2030 deadline for the elimination of petrol and diesel engine cars in the U.K. is simply not achievable. Unless we delay, we hand a massive boost to the Chinese car manufacturers. They are already dominant.”
Britain is to ban the sale of new cars that run on petrol and diesel only in seven years’ time under plans drawn up by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
New hybrids will still be allowed until 2035, at which point the U.K. will only permit fully electric cars and other zero-emission [sic] vehicles, such as those which burn hydrogen.
The EU’s e-fuel exemption will allow a synthetic alternative to petrol which is made by mixing carbon dioxide captured from the air with hydrogen obtained by splitting water molecules using renewable energy.
This is expected to be far more expensive than petrol, meaning it will initially benefit high-end carmakers whose customers will not be put off by the costs involved.
However, Benedetto Vigna, the boss of Ferrari, said this week that he expects the price to fall in coming years and experts believe it could be the thin end of a wedge that would allow carmakers to focus on producing lower-cost e-fuels instead of expensive battery powered cars.
Andrew Graves, a car industry veteran and professor at the University of Bath, said: “I think it’s a very exciting technology that we’re looking at, so that we can not only use it for things like motorsport, but we can also more importantly use it for keeping existing vehicles on the road. I think there’s a lot of things that the Government needs to look at before it goes hell bent on just having a blanket ban on diesel or petrol.”
Mr Graves added that there is already a risk that not enough electric car chargers and battery-making plants will have been built when the ban takes effect – a problem that may worsen if carmakers sense it is being watered down. …
The Telegraph understands that the British Government is prepared to follow the EU’s lead, with the Department for Transport understood to be amenable towards synthetic fuels so long as the industry can prove that they will be carbon neutral. …
Greg Smith, a Tory MP who sits on the Transport Select Committee, said: “Groupthink has dictated battery electric to be the way forward for too long when we’re already seeing the technology fail and not develop at the pace people need. The 2030 ambition isn’t realistic in the first place and we need the innovators and the automotive companies to be given the time and space to produce a time and space and not just jump to the betamax that’s available now.”
Worth reading in full.
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So we can keep our cars if we use extortionately priced “e-fuels”.
The intention is clear – to price all but the very rich off the roads.
It’s not a real intention, it’s a backtrack, get out clause!
The price of the e-fuel will be more than the price of running an EV, so in cost terms its a pointless exemption.
It is difficult not to conclude that the push for 15 minute ghettos will have to be ramped up. If the majority of the population can be forced out of cars then the ban on ICE cars by 2035 will be more or less self-fulfilling.
Yes its all about doubling down! The ptb have got it so so wrong for so so long they cannot back out now, its impossible, so God help us all!
Don’t worry e-fuel is a non-starter like wind and solar. It’s a pretence, probably to provide the excuse to keep ICE now the reality of EVs has raised its ugly head.
Ironically, since such a high proportion of the cost of road fuel goes in government taxation, doubling or trebling the actual cost of the fuel won’t have as much impact on the overall cost as you may have assumed.
However, I agree about the ultimate intention will be to keep the plebs off the road, and I assume that they’ll aim do this through road pricing, strict enforcement of ULEZ etc. Remember, it’s for your own good….
Mean while, the east grows rich at our expense while belly laughing at the silly weak west with all it gender nonsense!
When you put the ideological cart before the common sense horse then what do we expect? NET ZERO was simply waved through parliament here in the UK. There was no public consultation and no clue as to how any of it could be achieved and at what cost? Brick by brick the absurd eco posturing policy will collapse. Reality is a very real shock when you meet it head on. Our silly eco socialist governments are walking through the patio door but don’t realise it is shut ——
Thanks to the rantings of a 15 year old Swedish school girl!
The idiot child Thooooooooooooonberg was only the mouthpiece
But boy, has she got a mouth? Look where its led us! Self destruction
As LM has stated Greta is just the mouthpiece but without powerful backers she would be neither seen nor heard.
Just imagine any fifteen year old girl but one blessed with good looks spouting Greta’s nonsense in your town centre on a Saturday afternoon – even if she had star quality beauty she would be completely ignored.
Misleading headline.
E-fuel is not a scalable alternative to oil and gas.
This is just a new insane delusion to replace the previous insane delusion.
Meanwhile, the non-western world continues full steam ahead with its plans to accept reality and continue using fossil fuels.
Yes, and it’s also a loophole, a breather, a get out clause for an unelected governing body!
This won’t just effect private motoring. It will increase the price of all goods and cripple the economy.
The real damage to the economy will become apparent as the scale of job losses grows and there will be a snowball effect to all this.
So now they plan to divert ‘renewable’ energy from domestic and business use, in order to make a synthetic version of something which is readily available and useful in thousands of other applications across the entire spectrum of advanced economies.
Doesn’t seem like much of a win to me albeit perhaps it shows that reality is starting to dawn.
There’s a profit to be made for some. There probably will always be a market for some kind of synthetic fuel oil, notably for shipping and aviation. This Norwegian place may be of interest: https://www.norsk-e-fuel.com/en/
In what vehicles and what manufacturers have the new e-fuel been tested? What cities and/or provinces have adopted e-fuels, in test or in demo mode, and what were the results? Where are the test results? Who is manufacturing e-fuel? What is the cost (comparing energy equivalents with other currently-used fuels? Will e-fuels deliver sufficient energy to supply to the massive diesel fleet (upon which we depend for food, supply chain, transportation, etc.)?
So much for the rantings of a 15 year old Swedish school girl!
Regulatory alignment.
total about-face on a bureaucrat’s say-so.
E fuels is just a massive excuse for “what a f#/k up, how do we backtrack?
The latest and best fully synthetic fuels will cost at least €30 a liter! That’s now! Not 6 years ahead!
This massive farce is finally hitting the fan of reality!
I bet the greenies are f’ing jumping atm?!
Nah, it’s e-fuel.
If it has “e-” in the name or “green” or “eco”, they like it.
And “zero” things are even better.
And don’t ask them to think about consequences or costs. That just kills their buzz.
Love it!
Net clean eco friendly zero!
Come on, there’s bound to be more wishy washy words we can add to these, be profound!
That story even made it onto the Beeb’s global propaganda show on R4 in the small hours today.
Given the structure of the business – in particular, manufacturing – it’s insane to try and be independent of the rest of the market.
It may be that they will try to go down the Brazil route for a while – over there, they use a much higher proportion of ethanol (made from sugar cane in their case), compared with E10 petrol, for which a large chunk of the ethanol comes from animal grade wheat here, or corn (maize) in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil and loads of other sources are available on that topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAz8191_Z0I&list=WL&index=116 and https://www.norsk-e-fuel.com/en/ on this topic might also be of interest. The poor thermal efficiency of any such processes is the main issue of criticism.
If that’s the plan, it’s not going to go well. Europe doesn’t have these vast unpopulated areas just waiting to be used to cultivate corn and soy and whatever else is used in eco-fuels.
I think we can confidently say that the Brazil route is not the solution. Unless of course we forgo normal food and shift to eating insects…
It does. Poland is already vast and mostly empty, ie, the areas where German farmers used to live before the Russians drove them away are still wilderness. Things get worse in former eastern Prussia which is basically a Russian nuclear base in an empty country with population density a lot less than Poland. And then, there’s Ukraine, immensely huge but the population is only half the number of people living in today’s Germany. The same is probably for the southern parts of artifically-slavic Europe as well: The politically dominant peoples have no interest in farming the land. The farmers were driven away from the places where they had lived for centuries in the name of racial purity. That was a depopulation agenda, by the way, and one which would nowadays usually (and somewhat wrongly) be called a genocide.
But then, killing Germans is obviously never a genocide, they just deserve it.
Hmm. Russia, Ukraine, and Poland becoming a major source of animal feed grade wheat…. (for use in processes like this one https://vivergofuels.com/ ). Spot the political, and financial risks. Perhaps certain oil companies will buy a lot of land before too long.
Just to emphasise the scale, if chernoble had happened in the uk, the whole of it would be uninhabitable!
Absolute weapons grade bollocks.
Wow, now that’s serious bollocks
It’s very noticeable that the lunatic policy to ban fuel-efficient petrol cars from 2035 has been stopped by the German motor manufacturers/Government …… whilst the British Government was perfectly prepared to destroy our own car manufacturing sector on the altar of Eco Lunacy.
The EU ….. a racket to protect the German economy, paid for by every other member state (and us).
How’s the weather in cloud cuckoo land?
The EU started with the attempt to intertwine the German and French steel and coal industries to such a degree that future Franco-German border wars would become impossible, engineered by Robert Schumann and Konrad Adenauer as anti-German policy. It has since grown into an boundless siphoning off of German of money to other EU members. Somewhat simplified, the Euro works because the Germans are underwriting all government debt of any EU country. It’s the stated intent of the current German ruling party that it (Germany, not the SPD) will ultimatively cease to exist as souvereign state and just become an EU region mostly populated by immigrants from all over the world. And that’s the less anti-German ruling party. The more anti-German ruling party – the Greens – would really love to abolish it today and Green politicans are somewhat routinely telling ethnic Germans who aren’t happy with unbounded immigration from Africa and the Middle-East that they’re perfectly free to emigrate to another country as this one is their’s (according to the last federal election in Germany, the Greens represent less than 15% of the electorate, ie, more 85% are opposed to it).
As far as I know, not even the Labour party has so far asked the native population of rural England to get lost somewhere in the world because they love everyone else much better.
I don’t know ….. why don’t you open the door and have a look outside.
One of the reasons why you keep getting screwed is that you always fall for people who expertly play on your prejudices, if even their stories are grossly mismatched to observable reality.
And don’t forget about the planned lifecycle of any product, such as an engine. If a manufacturer knows when the “shut off” date is likely to be, they’ll have to decide if it is worth producing something, around 8 to 10 years ahead.
Indeed and the same logic would also apply to the ‘parts’ industry be it tyres, windscreen wipers, light bulbs, windscteens etc.
I suppose for our political class, blindly following whatever the EU does keeps their cherished alignment to Brussels, and ensures they don’t need to actually think for themselves or focus on how policy will affect ordinary people. Oh how badly we are served…
E-fuel… perpetual motion invented.
So we extract C02 and CO from the air, mix it with hydrogen from some magical process, burn it in air and release the CO2 and the CO that was extracted to give a zero sum result. Because nature is nice and neat like that. Just as it was discovered that burning trees and planting new ones to recover the CO2 released, didn’t match up either.
And of course the energy input to produce this miracle e-fuel will far exceed the energy output.
We use the wind and solar power to provide the energy for all this despite the fact it can’t provide enough energy to supply our current needs, so whence this extra energy? And where the technology to extract CO2 and CO in quantity?
Now the Germans are building coal fired power stations, the French are going back to nuclear reactors instead of replacing them with wind, the UK replaced its coal-fired stations with wind but then found in fact it had replaced them with gas as wind was not up to it and the idiots in charge have recently declared nuclear to be ‘sustainable/renewable/green’ because the penny has dropped that wind and solar are useless.
So they’ll futze around with e-fuel, carry on the pretence for lone enough then eventually after a load of economic and social damage has been done – go back to fossil fuels.
It’s like watching a hormonal teenager go through a phase.
E-fuel… perpetual motion invented.
So we extract C02 and CO from the air, mix it with hydrogen from some magical process, burn it in air and release the CO2 and the CO that was extracted to give a zero sum result.
As far as I know, this is a German idea and it might well work out. The problem with so-called renewable power sources is that they deliver power only intermittently and regardless of how much power is actually needed by the grid at the moment. If this E-fuel idea can be made to work economically, ie, at a sufficiently large scale that it’s going to be available at realistic prices, the idea is probably that this is basically a storage technology using readily available raw materials (atmospheric CO2 and water) which can consume whatever power renewable power sources deliver at the amount and use it to drive a chemical reaction which enables more controllable release of some of that power at a more convenient time.
At least, that’s probably the theory behind it.
Building a large scale facility that can only produce when the weather is just right and using that to meet a large and relatively fixed demand seems like a recipe for high manufacturing costs, even higher costs to the consumer and frequent shortages.
In other words, The usual conspiracy theories must be recyclable here!
But there’s reason to assume that they may be not. The problem with so-called renewable energy sources, especially wind turbines, is that they produce electricty depending on the weather and regardless of the current need for electricity. In the event of something like a storm in the night, people have to pay other people to get rid of the electricty that’s surplus at that time. That’s a well-known problem and the idea of a set of largely automated facilities which can thus operate whenever an electricity surplus cannot otherwise be gotten rid of is a possible solution for that, provided it’s possible to produce enough of the energy storage material ahead of the next rise demand.
I don’t claim this this must be a viable solution, especially considering that this is – so far – experimental technology, but it could become one. This remains to be seen.
Potholes everywhere. 15 minute cities by stealth
Thursday 30th March 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction A321 Marshall Road &
Raeburn Way College Town
Sandhurst GU47 0FL
“The 2030 ambition isn’t realistic in the first place and we need the innovators and the automotive companies to be given the time and space to produce a time and space and not just jump to the betamax that’s available now”
That politicians can compare wilfully crashing the economy – and everyone’s lives – headlong into the ground to choosing the right kind of video recorder shows how utterly divorced from reality and incapable of rational, independent thought they are. This is beside the fact that every alternative solution they propose when confronted with a glimmer of this reality is tantamount to closing their eyes and chanting incantations (magic fuel, magic batteries, new technologies forever just over the horizon and so on).
These people and the band of cultists and boot-fillers egging them on need to be removed to a place very far away where they can only harm each other.
How long before we have to provide an explanation to the authorities for going more than 15 minutes’ drive from our homes?
The buyer dictates policy not Governments. If the carmakers sell less cars then e-fuels and E- cars will be dropped.
The arguments in favour of net zero are simply deluded, for all the reasons outlined in many previous articles – that the alternatives to fossil fuels are more expensive when infrastructure manufacture costs are included; that many are sporadic (wind power) or inefficient (heat pumps); that energy storage on the scale needed is unachievable. For my own part I live in a Grade 2 listed building with nowhere to put a heat pump, nowhere to add solar panels and nowhere to install a charger for my car – we have no on street parking. So, unable to drive and freezing, I will be in trouble. I doubt I would be the only one. As for panicking about carbon dioxide it might be great if it enables us to green the Sahara, and as for sea level changes you have only to look at a map of the English coastline in Norman times to realise that what is predicted now is simply a return to then. Nothing to do with human activity. Just a normal cycle. So let’s abandon this nonsense altogether.