Former Formula 1 boss racing to create 100% sustainable fuel

Paddy Lowe is the co-founder of British-based Zero Petroleum.

For decades, he devoted his time working out how to make Formula 1 cars go faster, now his tagline is '600 million years in three minutes,'' as he focuses on consigning fossil fuels to history.

In June, he opened 'Plant Zero.1,' billed as the world's first fully-integrated facility, to make synthetic fuel from air, water and renewable energy.

The science is based on the 1920s work of Germans Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, who came up with a process to produce liquid hydrocarbons from coal.

"So when you burn a regular fuel, fossil fuel such as gasoline, petrol or diesel or jet fuel, what comes out of the exhaust pipe is carbon dioxide, that’s burnt carbon, and water which is burnt hydrogen. What we do is take those exact same molecules out of the atmosphere again, so the water and the carbon dioxide, we add in new energy and reconstitute that as a hydrocarbon."

The new plant will make a mere 30 liters of fuel a day, not enough to fill a car tank, but sufficient for technical evaluations, research and certification.

Lowe sees synthetic fuels as the future not just for cars, but also aviation, shipping and agriculture, where electric is not a viable option due to weight or range.

He predicts the cost of synthetic fuel, currently eye-wateringly expensive, would plunge.

"The next step, which we call Plant Zero.2 will be to take this exact same technology to a scale of maybe 500 times, 1000 times bigger where we are making enough to sell it to clients, to sell it to the public, so this is a commercial grade plant.

"So eventually, within just a few decades, we anticipate with very great conviction that all the fuel we use today as fossil fuel and more, because consumption will not reduce, will be made by synthesis, will be synthetic fuels rather than dug out of the ground."