Action to Cut Carbon Emissions!

These days, transporting products and people globally makes up about fifteen percent of the world’s carbon emissions. Meanwhile scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that in order to halt climate change, carbon emissions must not only be eliminated but actively removed from our environment.

Carbon-emitting fuel stations in use today are incompatible with transportation design changes needed in order to prevent climate changes. Innovation will therefore become a central challenge for fuel stations worldwide. The question that needs answers is 'how can fuel stations of the future remove excess carbon from the atmosphere, rather than emit carbon into the atmosphere?'

A couple of approaches have already started to materialize, which offer hope of transportation design solutions to carbon removing fuel stations becoming a reality.

Biofuels are already in significant use, however they are nowhere near having a net-zero emissions profile. In order for this approach to fulfil a net-negative carbon target, the bio fuel production process would need to reduce emissions. This could be achieved, for example, by using sustainably grown biomass transformed through a thermochemical process into liquid fuels with a low carbon imprint, while capturing production associated emissions and sequestering them underground. In a situation like this the net emissions from these fuels can be negative, sequestering more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. This transportation design technology has already been demonstrated at the Midwest Geologic Sequestration Consortium project.

Another option would be to use direct capture systems in order to manufacture fuel from excess carbon in the atmosphere. Audi has already engaged the Swiss start-up company Climeworks to use their direct air capture technology in order to produce a carbon neutral fuel.

Examples such as these could result in carbon negative fuels, however, fuel stations in the future may not be selling these types of fuel at all. New forms of transportation designs could mean that the internal combustion engine could be discarded in favour of other engine types that are powered through carbon negative energy sources. Vehicles that run on electricity are already in use, ensuring that electricity is produced by a carbon negative power grid has many possibilities.

All of these solutions also have their drawbacks though; a sustainable biomass supply may not meet the demands for carbon negative biofuel, direct air capture technology may be more expensive than other biofuel alternatives making their adoption challenging, and converting transportation designs such as airplanes and ships to electric has been notoriously difficult to achieve.

It may well turn out that a combination of methods end up being used, and new methods not yet successfully implemented are fine tuned. One thing is certain though, if society is to mitigate climate change, then the fuel stations of the future must be very different from those of today.