Photo: Prodrive
Prodrive has announced the development of a sustainable racing fuel, which the company has pledged to use to replace fossil fuels during the 2022 Dakar Rally. The British motorsport specialist is not the first company to develop a sustainable fuel and then employ it in racing cars, so this seems like a trend in the market.
The sustainable racing fuel developed by Prodrive has taken eight months to be ready, and it was done in collaboration with Coryton Advanced Fuels. The result is called Prodrive ECOpower, and it is made mostly with second-generation biofuels from agricultural waste, while the rest of the blend is in the form of efuels created by capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
As Prodrive notes, the fuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent when compared to equivalent gasoline. That is a great figure, and we wish that more companies would get in on the whole sustainable fuel business. Eventually, with enough competition, this alternative to fossil fuels will be cheap enough to sell to the public at your average filling station.
Sadly, since each automaker seems to team up with a different company for this sort of thing, it appears that we are further from that moment than we could have been. The gut-wrenching part is that this fuel has already been tested by Prodrive in its Hunter T1+ without any modifications, and it runs just like it did when it had gasoline in its fuel system.
In other words, sustainable fuels can be done, and they can replace unleaded gasoline in almost any vehicle that has a spark-ignited engine. So, the technology is there, sustainable fuel exists, but we do not know the price.
Each company that gets involved in this field seems to keep that last bit a secret. Since this is a replacement for racing fuel, which can be three to four times more expensive per liter than gasoline, we expect sustainable racing fuel to be pricey. And if things are at that level, people would not willingly switch to it if they had a choice at a filling station.
As Prodrive notes, the fuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent when compared to equivalent gasoline. That is a great figure, and we wish that more companies would get in on the whole sustainable fuel business. Eventually, with enough competition, this alternative to fossil fuels will be cheap enough to sell to the public at your average filling station.
Sadly, since each automaker seems to team up with a different company for this sort of thing, it appears that we are further from that moment than we could have been. The gut-wrenching part is that this fuel has already been tested by Prodrive in its Hunter T1+ without any modifications, and it runs just like it did when it had gasoline in its fuel system.
In other words, sustainable fuels can be done, and they can replace unleaded gasoline in almost any vehicle that has a spark-ignited engine. So, the technology is there, sustainable fuel exists, but we do not know the price.
Each company that gets involved in this field seems to keep that last bit a secret. Since this is a replacement for racing fuel, which can be three to four times more expensive per liter than gasoline, we expect sustainable racing fuel to be pricey. And if things are at that level, people would not willingly switch to it if they had a choice at a filling station.
Google News