World's first commercial e-fuel plant opens,

producing diesel from green hydrogen —

backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos
Infinium's Pathfinder facility combines renewable H2 and
captured CO2 to produce ultra-low-carbon fuel for Amazon
trucks

By Leigh Collins
The world’s first commercial-scale e-fuel plant has begun operations in
Corpus Christi, Texas, producing e-diesel made from green hydrogen and
captured CO2 for Amazon trucks.
California-based Infinium’s Pathfinder facility takes green hydrogen
produced from wind energy, adds CO2 captured from an adjacent Howard
Energy Partners gas processing facility to produce syngas, which is then
processed via the start-up’s proprietary liquid fuel production process (that
requires its patented catalysts).

The resulting e-diesel will be used as a drop-in fuel by existing Amazon

trucks, but will be far more expensive than fossil diesel.

Amazon made an early investment in Infinium back in January 2021, while

Breakthrough Energy Ventures — backed by billionaires including Bill
Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — is also an investor.

Gates visited the Pathfinder plant yesterday, writing in his GatesNotes blog:
“The key to Infinium’s approach is that their fuels can be dropped into
existing engines. That’s huge. It means that companies won’t have to adapt
their fleets, removing one of the biggest hurdles to transitioning to a new
fuel.

“Sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get [an Amazon] delivery
supported by Infinium eDiesel.”

Infinium has revealed little about the project in terms of its size or annual
output, or the cost of the e-diesel, and is yet to respond to questions from
Hydrogen Insight.

But according to Gates, the Corpus Christi facility is a “demonstration

plant”, and that the company’s Project Roadrunner facility — being built at
an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas, backed by a $75m investment by
Breakthrough Energy — “will increase the company’s capacity for
producing eFuels ten-fold”.
The only other operational e-fuel facility in the world is HIF Global’s Haru
Oni pilot project in southern Chile, which shipped 24,6000 of synthetic
gasoline to the UK for use in Porsche race cars.

The initial e-fuel from that plant cost about €50 per litre to manufacture,
according to a report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research last year, which was 100 times more than the typical wholesale
price of fossil-based gasoline. However, that project uses carbon dioxide
captured from the air — a far more expensive and energy-intensive
process compared to Infinium’s piping of captured CO2 from an adjacent
facility.

“As both a technology innovator and a project developer, we have end-to-

end control of the eFuels production process,” said Infinium CEO Robert
Schuetzle. “This gives us a constant feedback loop that enables us to rapidly
accelerate additional projects and scale our global production of eFuels.”

Infinium says it has more than a dozen projects under development in the
US, Europe, Japan and Australia, but it has only announced three. In
addition to Pathfinder and Roadrunner, the third is the Reuze project in
Dunkirk, northern France, which it is co-developing with French utility
Engie.

That project will use a 400MW electrolyser to produce green hydrogen that
would be combined with CO2 captured from a nearby steel plant.

HIF Global has been given the green light by local authorities to build a
massive e-fuel plant in southern Texas that would require 1.8GW of
electrolysers, where the company plans to start construction this year.
Is e-fuel a good idea for road transport?
A coalition of green groups said last year that “making e-fuels for road transport
would be an unacceptable waste of renewable electricity” and very
expensive.

“Even with an optimistic approach, a driver with a synthetic gasoline car in

2030 would spend €10,000 [$10,860] more than a driver with a battery
electric car over five years,” the coalition wrote in a press release, describing
that “as an unapproachable price difference for most Europeans”.

When a battery electric vehicle is powered by renewable energy, 77% of

the initial power is used to turn the wheels.

“In the case of e-fuels, the efficiency is only 20% for electro-diesel and 16%
for electro-gasoline,” the group explained.

By contrast, e-fuels are likely to be necessary to decarbonise aviation as

battery options would be too heavy for long-distance flights.