奇速英语

全球首个碳中和燃料综合性商业生产工厂

In Chile, Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF)—a small start-up company, is establishing what it calls a first-of-its-kind facility which it hopes will be an initial step on the road to an energy revolution. HIF’s “Haru Oni” project is a 37,000-squre-meter, $55 million site intended to demonstrate a will-be-successful commercial process for turning wind, water and air into man-made fuels that can be used to power everything, from cars to ships to airplanes, while significantly cutting carbon emissions.

Comprising a wind turbine(风力涡轮机), carbon system and facilities it says are capable of manufacturing 130,000 liters of fuel a year. The project is still under construction but is scheduled to become operational later this year and begin producing man-made gasoline. HIF’s manufacturing process uses wind-generated electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen through a process called electrolysis. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is captured from atmospheric air and industrial sources. Hydrogen is combined with the carbon dioxide and changed into eFuels.

Meg Gentle, HIF executive director, said the process can be used to create all kinds of everyday fuels, including methanol, propane, gasoline and jet fuel, which can be used by standard engines without modification(改装). “Basically, anything that could be got from crude oil(原油) could also be made in this manner,” she said.

Much of the focus for decarbonizing(脱碳的) transport has been on the production of electric vehicles (EVs). Gentle argued, “we don’t need eFuels to compete against EVs,” and suggested EVs and eFuels can exist side by side—the latter helping to accelerate the carbon removal accelerate the carbon removal of the transport industry, while using existing cars and infrastructure(基础设施) such as pipelines and gas stations.

But to produce eFuels is currently consuming massive energy, making it more expensive than gasoline. eFuel could be five times more expensive than diesel, according to a 2019 paper by the UK’s Royal Society scientific institute, although its price depends on the cost of the electricity.