Geely to keep working on methanol vehicles – Li Shufu

MUSE ROBOT

Geely chairman Li Shufu has doubled down on the automaker’s stand to develop methanol-powered vehicles, even though there is a possibility that the pursuit may falter, Reuters reports. It will be testing methanol-powered taxis in some cities in western China in a bid to lower overall carbon emissions.

Besides that, Geely’s commercial vehicle division will also be developing methanol-powered trucks. This follows an investment Li made in Carbon Recycling International, an Icelandic company that has developed a technology to produce renewable methanol from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The process involves using water electrolysis or hydrogen captured from industrial waste gases.

“We will keep exploring methanol vehicle technologies. Of course it might fail in the end, but currently we are still working on it,” Li said in an industry conference in the western city of Chongqing.

Using methanol as a fuel for vehicles will bolster China’s energy independence because it has huge amounts of coal, which can be converted to methanol. While Li did not elaborate on the details of the technology, he expects methanol cars to be cleaner than gasoline models.

Besides that, Geely is also developing battery electric vehicles, petrol-electric hybrid cars and hydrogen commercial vehicles. It will be a busy year for Geely, having recently announced a number of collaboration projects with the likes of Baidu, Tencent, Foxconn, and the Concordium Foundation. It also plans to build a new battery plant, and commercially produce satellites for realising vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications for full autonomous self-driving.

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