Renowned engineer Paddy Lowe, who spent decades measuring in milliseconds how to make Formula One cars faster, is now focused on relegating fossil fuels to history. Now 61, Lowe, who stepped down as Williams F1 technical director in 2019, has become a pioneer of synthetic fuels as co-founder of UK-based Zero Petroleum.
On Wednesday, he opened “Plant Zero.1,” billed as the world’s first fully integrated facility to produce synthetic fuel from air, water, and renewable energy, at a former World War II airfield near Oxford.
Lowe has had no talks with Formula One and does not miss it, he says without being prompted. However, the technology he is developing is of great relevance to a global sport whose 72% carbon footprint is due to air travel and logistics.
Zero entered the Guinness Book of World Records at the end of 2021, with the British Royal Air Force as a partner and provider of research and development funding, for the first flight powered by a fully synthetic fuel.
Lowe says, “A lot of people don’t believe things until they see them actually happen, and that’s what we achieved there.” During his dominant periods in Formula One with McLaren and Mercedes, he has always felt “fossil fuel guilt.”
Lowe argues that eventually, in just a few decades, he expects with great conviction that all the fuel currently used, including even more due to increased consumption, will be produced synthetically.
The science behind the technology dates back to the 1920s, when Germans Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch developed a process to produce liquid hydrocarbons from coal.
Lowe says synthetic fuels captured directly from the air are the future for aviation, shipping, and agriculture, where electric options are not viable due to weight or range.
The current cost of synthetic fuel is extremely high, but Lowe predicts it will drop considerably over the next 10 years, and beyond that point, it will be cheaper to produce synthetic fuel than to extract it from the ground.
The new plant will produce just 30 liters of fuel a day, not enough to fill a car tank but enough for technical evaluations, research, and certification. The next step, Plant Zero.2, will produce enough “100% compliant” fuel to operate commercially, and future facilities will be capable of producing hundreds of tons of fuel daily.