The road transport sector is responsible for a significant share of greenhouse gas emissions and its share has been increasing since the 1990s.
Major dilemmas can be identified in the transport sector, as the environmental friendliness of electric vehicles in their current form is also highly questionable. This is partly due to the raw materials used for batteries and in the manufacturing process (e.g. rare earth metals) and the sources of electricity used for charging. In the face of these drawbacks, there has been a growing focus on alternative/synthetic fuels, which have a number of positive features, including the fact that they can be "refuelled" at conventional filling stations and the advantages of internal combustion engines.
Today, there are several companies producing synthetic fuels, which unfortunately still cost a lot of money at the moment, around $ 10 per litre, but there are plans to bring this down to under $ 2. A further limitation to the uptake of innovative fuels is that they can only meet a small percentage of demand due to low production capacity.
Could synthetic fuels in the future offer a real alternative to their fossil counterparts in conventional internal combustion engines? How do legislators see the dilemma between electric vehicles and synthetic fuels?
For more information on alternative fuels, see: https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-information/alternative-fuels
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