The fuel made from air and water that could power F1 cars

Category: (Self-Study) Science/Environment

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Supercars that run on air and water—that’s the dream for synthetic fuel manufacturer Zero. The UK-based company says it is planning on powering a Formula One team with a more environmentally friendly fuel.

The company behind it announced a partnership with Formula One team Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber earlier this year. The move aligns with the motor sport’s aim of going carbon-neutral by 2030.

Zero has a small plant in Oxfordshire that manufactures the fuel. The next step will be a commercial-scale factory in the next few years.

“So there’s two things that make this feel special. First of all, we make it just from air, water, and electricity. […] But when we end up, the fuel is identical or even better than existing fossil fuel. So it will work in today’s cars, trains, airplanes, and the like,” explains Nilay Shah, Chief Scientific Officer at Zero.

The fuel is made by extracting carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water using renewable energy. These are combined to create carbon monoxide, which is processed with catalysts to create synthetic fuel.

The company was founded by Paddy Lowe, who spent decades working in Formula One.

He forecasts that the first commercially available synthetic fuel will be around four to five times more expensive than traditional fuels, but expects that cost to drop rapidly over the next ten years.

He says the sport will be a pioneer of synthetic fuel. “It’s world-famous for pioneering new technologies, new ideas, and then eventually bringing them to the mainstream. And so it will be with fuel,” he says.

By Formula One’s own figures, its carbon footprint was 223,031 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for the 2022 season, down 13 percent since 2018. But still a way off from net zero. And the fuel the cars burn is just a tiny slice of those emissions, says Lowe.

“This is a point often made that the biggest carbon footprint in Formula One is not with the cars, but with, for instance, the spectators coming in their cars or all of the freight and the people coming across the globe in airplanes. True. But you do have to start somewhere.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

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[Lamborghini racing on track]

[Lamborghini Sterrato on race track]

[Lamborghini on track]

[Zero plant, where synthetic fuel is manufactured using air, water and electricity, using renewable energy]

Nilay Shah (interview): “So there’s two things that make this feel special. First of all, we make it just from air, water and electricity. So those are our starting materials. But when we end up, the fuel is identical or even better than existing fossil fuel. So it will work in today’s cars, trains, aeroplanes and the like.”

[Plant machinery to board showing process of manufacturing synthetic fuel]

[Board showing process]

[Shah looking at plant machinery]

Nilay Shah (interview): “So this is really where the magic happens. We’ve got to the point where we’ve got hydrogen, carbon monoxide. So the hydrogen and carbon monoxide come into this reactor here, which is a number of tubes packed with catalysts. And what goes in is hydrogen, carbon monoxide. And what comes out the bottom is our target fuel. So this is the key reactor in our whole process.”

[Entrance to Zero premises, event to mark launch of partnership with Formula 1]

[Audience to classic race car with engine running]

[Classic race car with engine running]

[Paddy Lowe, founder of Zero, addressing audience]

Paddy Lowe (interview): “The relevance of Formula One in this space is that this will be one of the platforms where these fuels are first deployed because Formula One does things like that. It’s world famous for pioneering new technologies, new ideas and then eventually bringing them to the mainstream. And so it will be with fuel.”

[Lamborghini driving off]

[Lamborghini driving on track]

[Driver]

[Lamborghini driving on track]

Paddy Lowe (interview): “This is a point often made that the biggest carbon footprint in Formula One is not with the cars, but with, for instance, the spectators coming in their cars or all of the freight and the people coming across the globe in aeroplanes. True. But you do have to start somewhere. And starting in a place where technology can be driven at a very, very fast pace, developed in terms of its quality, but also towards reducing cost. You start at the centre of it. And what happens later is that all of that knowledge and development propagates to those wider aspects.”

[Formula One driver Zhou Guanyu posing for photos]

[Zhou Guanyu in Lamborghini]

[Guanyu driving off]

[Guanyu driving]

[Guanyu driving car around track]

Zhou Guanyu (interview): “I’m happy to follow in the trend, how the world is growing, of course, to be sustainable fuel and like zero and producing. But for me, what I want is that making sure when we transition to that kind of system, we need to have the same, let’s say, energy transition that we have with these current F1 cars that we have in the engines because we don’t want to reduce engine horsepower more, let’s say, less affect on the management with the battery level. So we need to make sure everything like that is staying exactly almost identical. But then following the trend the world is going in, because you don’t want to change the DNA of motorsports or Formula One in general.”

[Lamborghini racing around track]

This script was provided by The Associated Press.