Japanese automakers have long been reluctant to fully commit to battery electric vehicles. Toyota has been the most vocal on this stance, with Chairman Akio Toyoda claiming that electric vehicles will never exceed 30 percent market share. Instead, companies from the land of the rising sun are looking to biofuels as a potential savior of the internal combustion engine. until ICEs that burn hydrogen It may also play a role in carbon removal.
Mazda, although a much smaller company, shares a similar philosophy. It is not ready to give up combustion engines, believing that they can still be made significantly cleaner. the Vision X Coupewhich was unveiled at the Japanese Mobility Expo, made headlines for its sleek design and rotary engine, but there was more to it than that.
The swoopy show car is designed to fit Mazda’s so-called “Mobile Carbon Capture” system, a device that literally sucks up to 20 percent of exhaust gases. While it may seem so Mazda Clutching at straws to save the combustion engine, the company insists it’s more than just a pipe dream.
“Although challenges remain, we have already established the technology at the pilot test level. We are now moving on to comprehensive validation towards practical implementation. We have experimentally confirmed that CO2 can be separated from the exhaust gases using CO2 absorbers. We will start pilot testing of the CO2 capture technology at the final round of this year’s Super Taikyū Series,” said Kazuo Ichikawa, specialist at Mazda’s Next Generation Environmental Technology Research Department.
“There are still some issues to solve,” Ishikawa admits, but the goal remains clear: to put a carbon capture device in production cars. The captured exhaust gases are dried, and the carbon is bonded to a crystalline zeolite substrate. The spent carbon dioxide stored in a small tank can then be used as raw material, possibly to produce recycled plastics.
The rotary engine we mentioned earlier does not run on gasoline, but rather on plant-derived biofuels made from Nanochloropsis. It is a type of microalgae that is highly efficient in lipid production, producing oil with diesel-like properties. As they grow, algae absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.
Mazda believes that producing this microalgae-based fuel “at a relatively low cost” could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 90 percent compared to fossil fuels. When combined with a carbon capture system that recovers 20 percent of a vehicle’s own emissions, a car like the Vision
In theory, Mazda says: “The more you drive, the less CO2 you emit.” But increasing biofuel production remains a major challenge. It currently takes about two weeks to purify just over one liter of fuel from a 1,000-litre culture tank. Ideally, large-scale biofuel production could make the carbon negative scenario a reality.
The captured carbon dioxide can be reused to grow more microalgae, meaning the car will help clean the air while driving. Mazda is serious about making this vision a reality, but while R&D makes sense, such a future depends heavily on scaling up biofuel production to viable levels. Infrastructure will also be needed to collect the captured carbon dioxide and properly dispose of it or reuse it2
