FILE PHOTO: F1 Formula One - Williams Formula One Launch - London, Britain - February 15, 2018 Williams' Chief Technical Officer Paddy Lowe during the launch Action Images via Reuters/Paul Childs/File Photo
(This June 15 story has been corrected to clarify Lowe's former position at Williams in paragraph 2)
BICESTER, England (Reuters) - Top engineer Paddy Lowe spent decades measuring in milliseconds how to make Formula One cars go faster, but his tagline now is "600 million years in three minutes" as he focuses on consigning fossil fuels to history.
The 61-year-old, who left his job of Williams F1 chief technical officer in 2019, has become a pioneer of synthetic fuels as co-founder of British-based Zero Petroleum.
On Wednesday he opened "Plant Zero.1", billed as the world's first fully-integrated facility to make synthetic fuel from air, water and renewable energy, at a former World War Two airfield near Oxford.
Lowe has had no talks with F1 and is not missing it -- he says so unprompted -- but the technology has huge relevance to a global sport with 72% of its carbon footprint caused by air travel and logistics.
Zero entered the Guinness Book of Records at the end of 2021, with Britain's Royal Air Force as partners and providers of R&D funding, for the first flight powered by a fully synthetic fuel.
"Many people don’t believe things until they see them happen for real and that’s what we managed to do there," said Lowe, who worked for McLaren and Mercedes during dominant periods in Formula One.
"This is just the beginning of a very exciting forward journey to take this incredible technology to a huge scale," added the Briton, who said he had always felt "guilt on my shoulder about fossil fuels".
"Eventually, within just a few decades we anticipate with great conviction that all the fuel we use today as fossil fuel and more, because consumption will not reduce, will be made by synthesis."
LIQUID HYDROCARBONS
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.
Lowe said direct air-capture synthetic fuels were the future for aviation, shipping and agriculture where electric was not a viable option due to weight or range.
"Mainstream aviation will use jetfuel indefinitely," he said. "Combine harvesters will not be electrified with any physics that I’m aware of."
He predicted the cost of synthetic fuel, currently eye-wateringly expensive, would plunge.
"We say in 10 years it will be parity with fossil. Beyond 10 years it will be cheaper. You move to a world where its cheaper to make synthetic fuel than to dig it out of the ground. Which is really exciting."
The new plant will make a mere 30 litres of fuel a day, not enough to fill a car tank but sufficient for technical evaluations, research and certification.
Lowe said the next step, Plant Zero.2, will produce enough "100% drop-in" fuel to operate commercially and future facilities would be capable of producing hundreds of tonnes of fuel daily.
The initial challenge was one of "capital, not capability", a problem familiar to anyone in Formula One.
"We have a fantastic team here, many of them from Formula One backgrounds, and we bring that culture of relentless innovation and development for greater efficiency and greater quality," said Lowe.
Formula One is due to use 100% sustainable fuel from 2026 and plans to be net zero as a sport by 2030.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Ed Osmond)
