According to “Welt am Sonntag”, the Lühmann Group, which is active in trading synthetic fuels, wants to overturn parts of the EU regulation passed in March, according to which newly registered cars must be emission-free from 2035. It sounds “nice to only allow emission-free cars,” said Lorenz Kiene, the head of the Lühmann Group, to “Wams”. However, the EU’s plan is “driven by ideology, not facts”.

Lühmann Group: “It makes no sense to only measure emissions at the exhaust”

The Lühmann Group particularly criticizes the planned ban on combustion engines because the EU only considers cars that do not emit any exhaust gases to be emission-free. But it makes “no sense to only measure emissions from the exhaust,” said company boss Kiene. Instead, CO2 emissions should be “recorded over the entire life cycle of a vehicle”.

Internal combustion engines that run on synthetic fuels called e-fuels are not emission-free. However, because the CO2 emitted during the production of the fuels is taken from industrial plants or from the air, they are considered climate-neutral in the balance sheet if the electricity used for production was produced using renewable energies.