All Porsche 911 GT3 Cup cars racing in this year’s Porsche Supercup series will operate on eFuels for the first time.
The German manufacturer says the fuel is ‘potentially near-carbon-neutral’ and is blended from a feedstock that comes from Porsche’s Haru Oni pilot plant in Chile. It follows on from three years of the Porsche Supercup using a second-generation, bio-based partially synthetic fuel mixture developed with Esso. Switching to eFuels is designed to be the next step in reducing carbon emissions in the company’s flagship single-make series. Porsche has so far invested over US$100 million in eFuel research and development for road car applications and wants to showcase some of its work through motorsport. eFuels are synthetic, liquid fuels produced from renewable energy sources such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide from the air. Porsche’s Haru Oni facility, which opened at the end of 2022, uses wind power to extract the hydrogen. The manufacturer currently gets its CO2 from a biogenic source but is developing a proof-of-concept direct air capture process (DAC) system that will be more environmentally friendly. The extracted hydrogen and CO2 are first turned into eMethanol, which is then distilled to lower the water content and converted through dehydration reactions into the synthetic gasoline that will be used in Supercup.
The introduction of eFuels will not require major modifications to the field of around 30 Porsche Supercup cars...