Monday 17 April 2023

Toyota and Exxon partner for ‘low carbon’ petrol engines

Toyota and ExxonMobil have joined forces to develop a petrol engine that can run low carbon fuels.

They claim the fuel blends that the cars could use would produce 75% less carbon emissions than regular petrol.

This would be a solution to existing vehicles; lowering their carbon footprint for drivers that cannot afford to go electric.

Feedstocks, biomass and ethanol make up the petrol replacement, which is currently in test phase.

The technology could also be used in hybrid vehicles, Exxon’s Andrew Madden said.

“Having a solution for liquid fuels that we can use in the existing fleet, having it in the kind of policy construct where we allow the market to innovate, is the lowest cost way to decarbonise transportation,” he claimed.

Tom Stricker from Toyota explained there needed to be an alternative option to electric vehicles, that will still allow emissions to fall for everyone else.

“No matter what you think the pace of electrification transition might be, there will be a billion, if not hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road for quite a long time,” he said.