In Issue 36 of Absolute Lotus, we featured the innovative Lotus Exige 270E, a tri-fuel car that runs on petrol, ethonoal and methanol. Build in 2018, it could have been the future for the internal combustion engine. Here, Jamie Turner, one of the engineers behind the project, explains how and why it was an environmentally friendly answer that retained ICE…

It is a source of great pride to me to say that I worked at Lotus for 21 years, becoming steeped in its ethos over that time. Obviously Lotus always prided itself on novel solutions and the Tri-Fuel initiative was, I believe, one of those; but, in fact, it was part of a much broader ‘e-fuel’ concept that we were promoting, which I will come back to. 

In 2006/7, we had built the Exige 265E bioethanol-gasoline flex-fuel car but then the food-versus-fuel realisation made it clear that biofuel is not really a scalable solution. By the same token, Richard Pearson (my opposite number in Vehicle Research) and I just could not see how mass electrification of the transport fleet could be made to work – so many things would have to be changed simultaneously that it was difficult to see how it could be achieved in short order. The prime mover and the energy supply system need a binary and simultaneous change, against the background of intensely unsure mineral supply, while trying to persuade a public that they really should adopt something with significantly less utility but at a much higher price, and all while doing nothing for the legacy fleet (these being cars with IC engines that are still running around and that have to continue to use fossil fuels). Electrification has now been adopted into law and, as we know, is being rigorously prosecuted worldwide, while seemingly ignoring the main fact: the problem of CO2 emissions in transport lies with the fuel, not the IC engine.

As the 265E was being developed Richard unearthed a book called The Methanol Economy by Nobel chemistry laureate George Olah, and it just made so much sense to us. While we have never claimed that the idea of decarbonised methanol was ours, we were the ones who realised that methanol could happily be mixed with gasoline and ethanol in any proportion in the same fuel tank, and with some clever engine calibration could massively widen the potential solutions to the problem. Olah himself acknowledged this in the second edition of his book – there is a section on the 270E at the back.

Obviously even changing the fuel would itself be a massive challenge. But at least it is only one massive challenge and, done properly, would also allow all existing vehicles to be decarbonsed in a gradual manner (no revolution would be required anywhere). We were keen on methanol to do this, although we also promoted ‘drop-in’ fuels (which would require more complex synthesis) – these being made to the same standard as existing gasoline, diesel, or kerosene, and which therefore could be used by any standard vehicle. This will have to be done for aviation anyway, as well as for some ocean-going ships. Such drop-in e-fuels would use the same feed stocks as methanol – in fact, in some pathways, they can use methanol as an intermediate step (gasoline particularly – commercially it has been made from methanol in the past by ExxonMobil in its ‘methanol-to-gasoline’ or MtG process).

Regarding pure methanol, it is the simplest energy carrier that is liquid at room temperature and pressure, and we saw the relatively small modifications necessary to traditional IC-engined vehicles as being much more easy for society to bear than having to shift everything to electricity pretty much instantly. The 270E was actually an evolution of the 265E, itself used to develop the technology. The fact that Andrew Muir – owner of the 270E who visited me with the 270E when I was a professor at the University of Bath – has operated it successfully on methanol for so long is immensely heartening. The technology works and it is cheap on a vehicle level.

This is spectacularly important for personal transportation. The IC engine has come to dominate transport because it is made from cheap materials using cheap processes and has a cheap fuel supply system (itself with minimal losses in the vehicle and in the infrastructure). It can also be refuelled very quickly and is easy to recycle. These very desirable attributes mean that we currently make IC engine cars continuously at a rate of three every single second. We’ve built and sold over two billion IC engine cars so far; while all of them do not still exist, obviously, it is quite sobering to think that every person alive today could have a seat in one. Furthermore, they are sold to people who generally take out high-interest loans to pay for them from their already-taxed income and with little in the way of economic incentive – the IC-engined motor car has been pretty much entirely funded by private capital throughout its history. The same cannot be said for EVs.

We also need to remember that of the four stakeholders in personal transport – the car manufacturers, the oil companies, the governments (via taxation), and – lastly – the consumer, only the latter puts any money in. All of the others take it out. If consumers cannot afford a solution forced on them, the whole economic model falls over, and then you have no solution.

Hence the argument for staying with liquid fuels in IC engines. Engines can be made so clean now that they clean the air in cities, but the clamour for action after the dieselgate scandal was used as a reason to demonise the whole technology. This is ridiculous, because it’s the most affordable one we have. The whole issue has become very politicised but the stroke of the politician’s pen does not guarantee success – as I fear we are about to find out.

Though I say it myself, Richard and I put together a very coherent argument – we know this because we spoke to oil and car companies and even politicians who all said as much – but because CO2 legislation was a long way in the future we couldn’t get much traction. Unfortunately the aforementioned and completely unforeseen dieselgate scandal handed those who would ban the IC engine all the ammunition they needed by allowing them to conflate CO2 emissions with the pollutant gases. It also suited them to suppress the fact that the IC engine does not have to operate on fossil fuels.

Very sadly, if we now end up in a place where mass electrification fails and we realise that we should have at least additionally supported drop-in e-fuels – or alcohol/gasoline flex-fuelling – all along, the planet will actually be in a worse place as far as fossil CO2 emissions are concerned. And be under no doubt – the ideal e-fuel scenario of extracting CO2 from the air and combining it with hydrogen from water electrolysis to make a liquid fuel for transport is truly carbon-neutral, provided it is powered throughout by carbon-free electricity. In fact, it can even be carbon negative if you also use e-methanol to provide what the plastics and chemical industry need as a feed stock too…

One last thing – it is often said that making e-fuels and using them in IC engines in the manner I have just described is pointless because it is so inefficient, and that we should only consider EVs because they are much less profligate with the primary, renewable energy needed to power the whole process. This is absolutely true as a scientific argument. But we have over 1800 times as much energy from the sun as mankind uses for everything, and people who say this have little grasp of the reality of what it takes to provide robust solutions to the mass market. Scalability, robustness of the process, and low cost are all much more important than efficiency. This is the engineering argument. True, efficiency will have a bearing on how much capital expenditure is needed, but provided the e-fuels made are miscible with the fossil fuels we use now we can introduce them in an evolutionary manner. And remember – anyone who thinks that an inefficient technology has no chance of success just needs to look at the IC engine, which is very inefficient – but is dominant because of its extremely low cost and high utility and convenience.

I still think we will have e-fuels as one of the solutions in the future, even in light-duty applications. Electrification is riddled with challenges and problems, and you can’t decarbonise the existing vehicles. Methanol is also being considered as a mainstream marine fuel. We have to use decarbonised jet fuel to be able to carry on flying. So, with the methanol/e-fuel argument we at Lotus were 15-odd years ahead of the curve (don’t believe the carefully-crafted Porsche story about their e-fuel plant being their idea – I have spoken to ex-Porsche engineers and they said they were well aware of what Lotus had suggested, and they thought it was great). The sad thing is that if society had started with e-fuels when greenhouse gas emissions were first determined to be a problem then we would have sorted the whole problem out by now. What a lost opportunity.

For myself, I still have a Lotus – an Elise SC – and still live four miles from Hethel. Although I left the company during the last few months of the Bahar era, that had little to do with my decision; it was down to a new manager deciding that EVs were the way to go, and then dismantling all that Richard and I had done on e-fuels over the previous five years. Richard left too. We are now both still working on solving the problems of carbon-free transport, and I am still heavily involved with e-fuels and their application. But Lotus is where I really came of age, and if you cut me I would bleed green and yellow: the shadow of Colin Chapman was a very long one indeed for me. I like to think he would have approved of the lateral thinking the company demonstrated back then. It would have kept lightness and simplicity as an achievable aim.

The Exige 270E was featured in Issue 36, where we met the man who has covered 85,000 miles in it during his ownership, proving the concept in the real world. Issue 36 is available via our back issues service here.