My “doom and gloom” editorial last month about the demise of the internal combustion engine may have been a bit early. Bosch in Germany has revealed that new synthetic liquid fuels which would run in today’s engines have the effect of making the engine carbon-neutral, and in fact the manufacture of these new fuels would have the effect of “sucking” excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Bosch calculates that the new fuel process, powered by renewable electricity, could reduce the carbon emissions in Europe alone by 2.8 gigatons, which is three times Germany’s carbon emissions in 2016.

Extrapolate this globally, particularly in high use countries such as America and China, and suddenly the world will be a much cleaner place!

It won’t happen overnight, of course, and it will have to be used in conjunction with electrification where possible, but what it means is that the future for the internal combustion engine is still bright.

Add to that continuous refinement of the ICE itself, as witnessed by Mazda’s amazing new SkyActiv engine, and maybe we can stop crying into our beer and get on with an interesting (and petrolhead) future! And on top of all that, it makes use of existing filling station infrastructure, without requiring additional refuel stations as hydrogen and electric powered cars would, and won’t require re-training in the repair and service industry..