The seventh annual meeting of the Baden-Württemberg Automotive Industry Strategic Dialogue (SDA) in Berlin marked a milestone in the collaboration between the Baden-Württemberg state government, Porsche AG and the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) with the signing of a letter of intent to develop further and support direct air capture (DAC) technology.

Reducing CO₂ emissions alone is not enough to limit global warming, the partners said; rather, in the decades to come there must be a parallel effort to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere on a major scale. DAC is a method of removing CO2 from the air.

The CO₂ can then be used as a raw material for the likes of renewable synthetic fuels (eFuels), products or applications such as beverages, plastics or graphite for battery production. It can also be stored in the ground on a long-term or permanent basis. With DAC, Porsche is focusing on an important future technology that is on the threshold of mass production and is now bringing the subject to the SDA context.

The SDA was launched in 2017 and has since initiated a large number of projects to take advantage of the opportunities of the transformation process in the automotive industry. The aim is to strengthen Baden-Württemberg not only as a leading business location, but also as a pioneer in sustainable mobility and new technology. From their base at Porsche, Andreas Haffner and Lutz Meschke work in the SDA as co-leads on the Vehicle and Data topics alongside Porsche employees from a number of different departments.

For Porsche, DAC technology is an engineering approach. It can help to establish a globally sustainable circular CO₂ economy, reduce CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and minimize the risk of raw material shortages. The joint initiative by the state government, Porsche and ZSW aims to bring DAC technology to market worldwide and to open up new business opportunities for companies from Baden-Württemberg.

At IAA Mobility last September, Porsche presented a model of DAC equipment that could potentially be used at the Haru Oni eFuels pilot plant just outside Punta Arenas, Chile. (Earlier post.)

We want to put industrial direct air capture technology into series production. Together with the experienced team at Volkswagen Group Innovation, our established eFuels partner HIF Global, and MAN Energy Solutions SE, we are examining the integration of a DAC pilot set-up at the e-fuels plant in Chile. We regard DAC as a viable future technology because it can be used to extract the carbon molecules required for the production of many products in a sustainable manner. So we are working on bringing the technology to a higher degree of maturity.

—Michael Steiner, Member of the Executive Board for Research and Development at Porsche AG