Renewable Gasoline

USA had a big effort to make bio-refinery gasoline from trees etc and most of these projects have gone belly-up in the last few years, even with high gasoline prices they did not work out. The fundamental thing is gasoline already exists (as petroluem) so the idea that artifitially manufacturing gasoline is somehow better or cheaper just does not work well unless mandated by gov't to support ag business. I don't mind using the word renewable for wind and solar, but calling biofuel renewable is a different story really green washing. Much less clear that growing farmland for biofuels is better than taking what exists in the ground already. Isocotane might be a little better than ethanol from corn though.

 

This is one of the (many) reasons that I believe that BEVs will be a complement to, rather than a replacement for the ICE.

If this scales up then we could also see more eco-chic plastics and lubricants as well.

 

Energy efficiency really depends on the source of the biomass and hydrogen. Here the biomass source is corn, which in the US is currently used for ethanol additives. Corn is not a great way to use the solar energy, as a great deal of fossil energy must be used for fertilizer, pesticide, transportation, etc. The process could be used to make it from corn stover or even switch grass which needs much less fossil energy. The problem here is costs.

Still if you subsidize these costs like we have corn for biofuels, then perhaps its a better use of funds to take switch grass to methane to octane instead of taking corn to ethanol. Say the octane costs $6/gallon from a second generation biofuel. The cheapest biofuel to add to gasoline is methanol but that requires a regulatory change to have cars produced that can burn more methanol. Methanol is an octane booster as well, but requires a bigger tank and perhaps bigger injectorss, as M85 has only about 59% of the energy as E10

 

The big advantage with this and the synthetic diesel is that we already have the infrastructure in place for it. A BEV won't work for everyone and every job. The ICE is still going to have a big role in the coming years and even decades.
Hydrogen fuel cells are almost a non-starter in the US because of the cost required for infrastructure. Going to higher portion of ethanol would also require a major investment in infrastructure. Most of the gasoline distribution pipelines in place now can't handle E10. Trucking it just isn't much of a burden right now. The cost of shifting the fleet to higher ethanol concentrations is then added on top of that.

Cheap petroleum makes investing in any alternative difficult now. But that isn't always going to be so. Higher costs and other drawbacks may be worth the price as opposed to changing the infrastructure and fleet to a different non-plugin, fuel.