A potential solution is on the horizon in the dispute over the phasing out of internal combustion vehicles in the EU. The German transport ministry apparently no longer wants to renegotiate the future CO2 limits for passenger cars, and thus the de facto end of internal combustion vehicles from 2035. Whether the EU Commission will accept the demands is still open.
According to information from the German publication Der Spiegel, the FDP-led ministry is demanding that the EU Commission commit to submitting a so-called delegated act by autumn of this year. It is to determine how cars powered exclusively by e-fuels can contribute to the EU’s targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to the report, Hartmut Höppner, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Transport, sent the proposal to the EU Commission by email. Since the regulation on the new CO₂ limits itself is not to be touched again, the most important point of contention would be settled.
That such a concession would be made by Wissing’s ministry was not yet foreseeable in the past few days. Although representatives of both the German Ministry of Transport and the EU Commission had repeatedly emphasised the progress made in the negotiations, the drafts of both sides, which were recently published in the media, gave a different impression. While the Commission, under pressure after Germany’s threatened abstention in the final vote, had proposed to create a new vehicle category for e-fuels that technically cannot be operated with fossil fuels, the German Ministry of Transport had surprised everyone with its own draft. This apparently provided that cars with internal combustion engines would not have to be fuelled exclusively with synthetic fuels from 2035, but could also have been fuelled with a fuel mix of e-fuels and petrol or diesel.
Wissing now seems to have backed away from this demand. According to Der Spiegel, the new proposal of the Ministry of Transport now only mentions vehicles with combustion engines “that exclusively refuel with CO2-neutral fuels”. For them, even after 2035, “a perspective is to be created that these can be newly registered”. This would again correspond to the original FDP demand, after the ministry had gone far beyond this demand with the draft submitted in the meantime, in that (partial) operation of new cars with fossil fuels would also have been possible.
A reaction of the EU Commission to the new draft from Berlin is not yet known. The fact that a regulation on the operation of new vehicles with combustion engines and pure e-fuel use is to be examined is already included in the planned law on CO2 fleet limits (since these are to be reduced to zero grams per kilometre, it is de facto a combustion engine phase-out). However, in the version that the transport ministry also agreed to last year, it is a so-called recital – a legally non-binding requirement. Wissing’s ministry is calling for more binding force here, and, according to the German Transport Minister, the Commission should therefore commit itself to submit a so-called delegated act by autumn of this year – which should then specify how precisely those cars with internal combustion engines that run exclusively on e-fuels “can contribute to the EU targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions”, as Spiegel writes.
That would probably be the maximum that the Ministry of Transport can currently demand. However, it is still not certain that it will actually be implemented as Wissing wants, because a delegated act of the Commission can be thwarted by the EU Parliament as well as by the Council of the Member States.
Keyword: Potential compromise found in EU e-fuels discussion