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So we know what cars will (not) be sold in 13 years, but we have no idea what we’ll be heating this winter with. This is exactly how it can be interpreted in a nutshell the results of the meeting of the ministers of the environmentwhen they approve a standard that practically makes it impossible to sell new cars with internal combustion engines from 2035, but at the same time they do not even have a guarantee of gas supplies for this winter for half of Europe.
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On the other hand, it is considered a success that the agreement will bring 35 billion crowns to our households threatened by energy poverty, i.e. less than the amount of RES subsidies each year. Well, simply a German proposal for a compromise, for which our representation votes – and does not negotiate a long-term strategic advantage instead of a temporary transfer of money.
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To have, like Germany, a long-term gas contract with Gazprom for a few crowns, we can vote for any vision. I just don’t understand why we didn’t exchange support for the German proposal for access to their long-term gas contract. In this way, we also threw the entire Czech industry overboard. Instead, we buy gas from them at a 200% – 400% markup and then solve – energy poverty. In addition, we now have to hope that the German government will save the company Uniper, from which we obtain a significant part of this commodity. As the only country in the EU, we have neither a long-term gas contract nor access to the existing LNG infrastructure, so we are completely dependent on someone else.
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The short-sightedness of our approach is all the more striking because it ignores the warning signal sent by German Vice-Premier Habeck and picked up news server EurActiv: Avoiding gas shortages would be “possible only if we do not send gas from our reserves to neighboring European countries”.
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How to push cars into electricity
However, the main problem lies elsewhere. The whole approach it clearly favors electric vehicles and alternative synthetic fuels are mentioned only as a salutation. So, detailed goals are set in the development of the availability of charging stations and their performance – but the possibility of synthetic fuels is actually ignored, i.e. alternatives where current distribution technologies and combustion engine technologies can achieve carbon neutrality in a different way without the additional enormous costs of building new infrastructure.
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Already today, there are about 20 million ethanol vehicles registered in the USA, and over 30 million in Brazil. Ethanol is obtained from corn and sugar cane, which is not such a big win, but in principle it is a carbon-neutral input, i.e. what is grown is burned. Current technologies are in a state where the standard consumption of thirsty American passenger cars is about 12 liters per 100 km, and they take about 13.5 for ethanol. Which for E85 fuel means a mixture of 2 liters of classic fossil gasoline, the rest ethanol. Which car from regular series production today can already boast such a fossil carbon footprint? These cars can also be converted to LPG, another alternative fuel, with reasonable investment costs.
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Of course, the real goal is purely synthetic fuels, where the input is not agricultural crops. Technically, we already know how to produce them today, after all Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (a chemical reaction in which carbon monoxide and hydrogen, or methane are converted into artificial substitutes for oil) is a discovery almost a hundred years old, but it is expensive considering the price of oil.
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However, research and investment expenditures by the private sector were not largely directed to the field of synthetic fuels and the possibility of their production, because there was still plenty of oil and investments were mainly made in the development of mining technologies and the search for new sources. Today, as a result of the oil industry’s investments in this area, unconventional oil reserves are estimated to be double the conventional ones. Nobody makes synthetic fuels on a large scale today because oil was a safe, accessible and still relatively cheap resource.
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Instead of being technologically neutral, allowing manufacturers to creatively find the best solution to the goal of carbon neutrality, for example through research into the large-scale production of synthetic fuels, it tells them in a prescriptive manner what other technologies to use. As a result, America can achieve better results and faster, even though it takes the climate goals somewhat with a grain of salt. Or actually that’s why.
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