HIF Global, Porsche and Volkswagen Group unveil New DAC unit

HIF Global, the world’s leading eFuels company, together with Porsche AG and Volkswagen Group Innovation, announced at the IAA Summit in Munich, Germany the development and installation of a Direct Air Capture (“DAC”) unit at the HIF Haru Oni Demonstration facility in southern Chile in 2024. HIF’s Haru Oni is the first fully integrated eFuels plant to test DAC technology. 

President and CEO of HIF Global, Cesar Norton, says, “We are not waiting for solutions to come to us; we are creating them and leading the way. We have proven carbon-neutral eFuels are a real solution to help decarbonize transportation. Now we are accelerating Direct Air Capture technology that enables efficient and low-cost CO2 capture – the future of CO2 recycling. We are very happy to be cooperating with Porsche to pioneer this unit in our facility in Chile and we hope to escalate this technology in the near future.” 

eFuels are produced by combining green hydrogen and recycled CO2, obtaining eMethanol which is then converted into eGasoline, eSAF, or other synthetic fuels. The Haru Oni facility is currently operating with biogenic CO2 and hydrogen produced with the strong winds of the Magallanes region. The DAC prototype comes as a supplementary solution, filtering up to 600 tons of carbon dioxide per year directly from the air. 

“To slow global warming, it is essential to reduce emissions and remove CO2 from the atmosphere,” says Michael Steiner, Member of the Executive Board for Research and Development at Porsche AG. “At the same time, we need CO2 as a raw material in many production processes. Why not combine the two? We’re working on that. We want to put an industrial direct air capture, or DAC, procedure into series production. Together with the experienced team at Volkswagen Group Innovation, our established eFuels partner HIF Global, and MAN Energy Solutions, we are examining the integration of a DAC pilot plant at the eFuels plant in Chile. We regard DAC as a viable technology for the future 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.” 

Earlier this year, HIF Global announced a complementary agreement with Baker Hughes to test their Mosaic DAC technology pilot units to accelerate DAC deployment at commercial scale.