That should have gone better: The Hamburg CDU leader spoke in the Bundestag about e-fuels – and with his ignorance got himself in trouble. For him, the rest of the world has had plenty of synthetic fuels for a long time – except Germany, once again, not.
E-fuels everywhere, only Germany doesn’t make it: CDU man messes up in the Bundestag
E-fuels are artificially produced fuels that are produced using electricity from carbon dioxide and hydrogen – and they are well on the way to at least delaying the EU’s plans to phase out combustion engines. They are not in use and hardly anyone wants to change anything about them. But according to Christoph Ploß, head of the Hamburg CDU, Germany lags massively behind the rest of Europe – after all, you can fill up with e-fuel anywhere there.
This is how the CDU man explained it a few days ago in his speech to the Bundestag:
There he said they were very happy, “that e-fuels, that climate-neutral fuels, that e-diesel can be sold at filling stations in the future. We are one of the last countries in the European Union where this is not possible.” When asked by the Green Group in which countries there are already e-fuels, Ploß couldn’t name any. However, he promised to provide a graphic that would show just that:
The problem: said graphic, which Ploß shared via Twitter days later, has nothing to do with e-fuels. Instead, this is about synthetically produced, so-called HVO fuels derived from vegetable oils become. They are considered a possible bio-alternative to diesel and are actually not permitted in Germany as a pure fuel. They may only be mixed with classic diesel up to a certain percentage, similar to E5 and E10.
Just as not every e-car is battery-powered, but there are also fuel cells, Ploß also throws the differences between different fuel alternatives overboard in his speech everything together in the big e-fuels pot.
For his criticism of the government, which gives the combustion engine too few chances – with the exception of the FDP – he should have prepared himself more carefully.
