The end of the combustion engine? | FT Energy Source

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The internal combustion engine in terms of our mass mobility for cars is going to disappear.

We are really in a global race against the clock when it comes to climate change. If we do not phase out combustion engines we will never reach our net zero goals.

The shift from fossil fuels to clean energy is by far the biggest project in the history of humanity.

Many, many customers cannot afford electric cars because they are very expensive.

Rumours of the death of the internal combustion engine are at the moment, greatly exaggerated.

The freedom of movement that is new in the history of man.

The advent of the internal combustion engine car completely changed the world that we live in. Has done a huge amount over the last century to pull a very large number of people out of poverty by giving them economic freedom to go and travel for work.

If you move people or goods, in most of the cases globally, you rely on combustion engine technology.

The transport system accounts for something like 8 per cent of our emissions just in terms of cars, for example. So decarbonising that requires us shifting away from using fossil fuels, and electrification is going to be a key part of that.

Many sectors, for example, steel or aviation, are completely behind on the trajectory to get to net zero. A few sectors where we can actually make progress and go to net zero are the power sector, with renewables, and cars and trucks with electrification.

Electric engines are three to four times more efficient, which makes the car cheaper. Batteries are improving fast, and the energy can come from clean electricity and doesn’t emit CO2.

The car industry across the globe is leading the EV transformation. Multi-billion dollar bets are being placed on this future.

The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified.

In Europe, we have a huge disparity, more than 50 per cent of all the charging infrastructure is today to be found in only two EU countries.

We’re going to need something like 400,000 chargers in the UK. So we’re nowhere near the scale of investment needed to actually make this work and make electric vehicles easy for people to use.

As we shift from internal combustion engine vehicles to EVs, we’re going to have to replace drilling with mining and the development of raw materials. We’re going to need a lot of lithium and cobalt and graphite and nickel and other critical minerals and raw materials. Whether there is enough or not is a big question.

China took the decision decades ago that it was going to specialise in batteries. It realised it had missed the boat on engines. As a result of that, today, the world leader in batteries is China. The need for batteries is going to be absolutely massive. China owns and controls a huge amount of that supply chain. That gives China an enormous amount of power in the world in the future.

Unless the European industry gets its act together and moves quickly, I think there’s a very real danger that it gets wiped out by Chinese mass-produced electric vehicles.

Many, many customers cannot afford electric cars because they are very expensive. And they are very sceptical in terms of the use of these cars due to infrastructure lack, due to range problems they see.

The costs of making this transition to electric vehicles is going to be enormously expensive. Every time someone drives up and needs to fast charge, the amount of power draw on that system is enormous. That means the energy grid has to be much more robust. That is very expensive and takes a very long time to put in.

When we talk about costs, I really think it’s important to stress that there is nothing inherently expensive about electric vehicles. They’re simpler. They have fewer parts. The reason why petrol and diesel cars are affordable today is because they had decades to really perfect mass production and efficiency in their production processes.

We want to make the combustion engine green, and it’s possible to make it green via synthetic fuels because not the engine is the problem. The fuels are the problem.

When Germany changed its mind, of course, there was a lot of angry in Brussels because it was the first time in history that Germany and any other country after having said yes, says no, and it was a breach of trust.

Synthetic fuels for cars are clearly a distraction. First, you have to convert electricity into fuel, and you lose half of the energy, and you make much costs. Then you have to convert it back to either electricity or motion.

Within road transport, e-fuels are e-fools in my view. So we’re really fooling ourselves that they will help Europe compete with Chinese batteries because they’re simply so inefficient.

Synthetic fuels are very likely going to be one of many solutions. We need all solutions to decarbonise our economies and mobility.

Our philosophy is that we say if we want to achieve net zero as soon as possible, then we should use all available technologies possible.

There has been a noticeable political pushback in the last six months. You’ve seen Germany lobbying for e-fuels to be allowed, something that would potentially extend the lives of combustion engines beyond 2035 in Europe, and you’ve seen the UK very noisily push back its EV-only mandate from 2030 to 2035.

I’m announcing today that we’re going to ease the transition to electric vehicles.

What has happened in the UK is not a very positive illustration of clarity because, in a way, the signal to customers and consumers has been that they have another five years before they choose to switch to electric or not but at the same time, the sales targets for vehicle manufacturers have not changed.

The German government still has the goal that in 2030, 50mn cars in Germany are battery electric cars. We are far away from that. We just reached 1mn in 2023. I don’t think this is going to work, and therefore, I’m quite convinced that we will have a different debate in two to five years from now.

I think there is no question we’re shifting to an electric vehicle future. And I think we will see fewer vehicles on the road with internal combustion engines as we go forward. But it will be a long time before the internal combustion is completely dead.

Essentially, there won’t be much reason to buy an internal combustion engine car in the back end of the 2020s. And banning it by 2035 will be largely irrelevant. It’ll be like banning the steam engine. We will have anyway moved on.

For me, it’s absolutely clear that for long-distance shipping and planes, using synthetic fuels or fossil fuels is going to be with us for a long time. And then we use combustion engines or turbines to do that.

Something that’s often lost is quite how long all of this is going to take. You will still be able to buy an internal combustion engine car in Europe in 2034. You’ll be able to buy one in the US much later than that, and Latin America much, much later than that. And these things are going to be on our roads for decades.