#86. Creating Sustainable Transport Energy Options for Everyone

by Tammy Klein (Transportation Energy Strategies) Dr. Amer Amer, Chief Technologist at Aramco, is leading the charge on R&D to improve the sustainability of transport fuels. Hear more about Aramco’s work in this area, what he thinks is the most consequential R&D work the team has done and is doing and how he envisions the future of transport energy decarbonization.

As Chief Technologist for Aramco’s Fuel Technology Research & Development, Dr. Amer leads a team of more than 70 research engineers and technicians focused on solving tomorrow’s fuel transportation challenges today. Since his promotion to the position of Chief Technologist for Fuel Technology in 2011, Dr. Amer has been responsible for the rapid expansion of Aramco’s fuels research in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and in Aramco’s two new Research & Development satellite centers in Paris, France, and Detroit, U.S.A. READ MORE ; includes AUDIO and Transcript

Excerpt: . Biofuels will also contribute to the equation and will be part of the solution. The only thing is that there is no one solution. It's a portfolio of solutions that will result in addressing this global challenge. So if we take a step back and we start looking, for example, at synthetic fuel, synthetic fuel is something that Aramco has been putting a lot of effort behind recently.

The way we look at synthetic fuel is that we think that it's a broad class of hydrocarbon fuels that are chemically synthesized and usually from hydrogen and CO2. Some people use Power to X or electro fuels to define those. From our standpoint, we're specifically interested in low-carbon synthetic fuels, which combine low-carbon hydrogen that is produced from renewable electricity with CO2. And of course,
CO2 in our view could be either captured directly from air or from industrial installations. Now, this fuel whether it's liquid or gas it can be engineered to be chemically similar to conventional fuels in the market, a true drop-in solutions.

One of those plants that we have planned for is going to be in Spain. And it targets the production of low carbon jet and diesel fuel, as well as NAPA. And, this technology uses reverse water, gas shift, and Fischer–Tropsch technologies. And usually these kind of units are
followed by hydrocracking and product upgrade units. We also have another plan here in Saudi Arabia. This is a bit more interesting because first of all, it's aiming at producing low carbon gasoline fuel using direct methanol synthesis, followed by methanol to gasoline technology, and of course, with some upgrade unit. The intriguing or the interesting part about this pilot plant is the fact that it's a double
plant that it will leverage the Kingdom's high cost competitive, renewable solar and energy. You know, the Kingdom has unmatched combined capacity factor for solar and energy. Ultimately, potentially demonstrating the lowest cost of these kinds of fuels in the future. READ MORE