Porsche’s Synthetic Gasoline Factory Comes Online Today in Chile

upstart writes:

The Haru Oni plant will scale up from 34,000 gallons to 14.5 million gallons by 2024:

This week, a Chilean startup called Highly Innovative Fuels officially opened its first synthetic gasoline production facility. HIF was created to run the new plant, which is the result of a collaboration between the automaker Porsche, Siemens Energy, Exxon Mobil, Enel Green Power, the Chilean state energy company ENAP, and Empresas Gasco. Initially, the site will produce around 34,000 gallons (130,000 L) a year, scaling up to 14.5 million gallons (55 million L) a year by 2024, with plans to increase that tenfold to 145 million gallons (550 million L) a year by 2026. The first gasoline produced by the plant was used to ceremonially fill a Porsche 911, a task performed by Chile's energy minister, Diego Pardow.

[...] The site, located in Punta Arenas in Southern Chile, will use wind to power the process-the area sees high winds roughly 270 days a year, and a wind turbine can expect to produce up to four times as much energy as one in Europe, according to Frenkel.

[...] As Steiner explained, the efuel plant will use wind power to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon captured from the air or industrial sources to synthesize methanol, which in turn can then be converted into longer hydrocarbons to be used as fuel. The synthetic efuel is a direct drop-in for pump gasoline, and initially Porsche will take all the site's production and use it to run its one-make Porsche Supercup race series as well as using it to fuel vehicles at its Porsche Experience Centers around the world. (These are locations where one can go and test a number of different Porsches.)

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