Electrofuels, also known as e-fuels, a class of synthetic fuels, are a type of drop-in replacement fuel. They are manufactured using captured carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, together with hydrogen obtained from sustainable electricity sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power.
The process uses carbon dioxide in manufacturing and releases around the same amount of carbon dioxide into the air when the fuel is burned, for an overall low carbon footprint. Electrofuels are thus an option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport, particularly for long-distance freight, marine, and air transport.
The primary targets are butanol, and biodiesel, but include other alcohols and carbon-containing gases such as methane and butane.
A primary source of funding for research on liquid electrofuels for transportation was the Electrofuels Program of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), headed by Eric Toone. ARPA-E, created in 2009 under President Obama’s Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, is the Department of Energy’s (DOE) attempt to duplicate the effectiveness of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. Examples of projects funded under this program include OPX Biotechnologies’ biodiesel effort led by Michael Lynch and Derek Lovley’s work on microbial electrosynthesis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which reportedly produced the first liquid electrofuel using CO2 as the feedstock. Descriptions of all ARPA-E Electrofuels Program research projects can be found at the ARPA-E Electrofuels Program website.
The first Electrofuels Conference, sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was held in Providence, RI in November 2011. At that conference, Director Eric Toone stated that "Eighteen months into the program, we know it works. We need to know if we can make it matter." Several groups are beyond proof-of-principle, and are working to scale up cost-effectively.
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Electromethanogenesis is a form of electrofuel production where methane is produced by direct biological conversion of electrical current and carbon dioxide. Methane producing technologies garnered interest from the scientific community prior to 2000, but electromethanogenesis did not become a significant area of interest until 2008. Publications concerning catalytic methanation have increased from 44 to over 130 since 2008. Electromethanogenesis has drawn more research due to its proposed applications.
Carbon-neutral fuel is fuel which produces no net-greenhouse gas emissions or carbon footprint. In practice, this usually means fuels that are made using carbon dioxide (CO2) as a feedstock. Proposed carbon-neutral fuels can broadly be grouped into synthetic fuels, which are made by chemically hydrogenating carbon dioxide, and biofuels, which are produced using natural CO2-consuming processes like photosynthesis. The carbon dioxide used to make synthetic fuels may be directly captured from the air, recycled from power plant flue exhaust gas or derived from carbonic acid in seawater.
Direct air capture (DAC) is the use of chemical or physical processes to extract carbon dioxide directly from the ambient air. If the extracted is then sequestered in safe long-term storage (called direct air carbon capture and sequestration (DACCS)), the overall process will achieve carbon dioxide removal and be a "negative emissions technology" (NET). As of 2022, DAC has yet to become profitable because the cost of using DAC to sequester carbon dioxide is several times the carbon price.
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