One of the most valuable classic cars on the planet has just been used to demonstrate the power of sustainable fuel.
The 1929 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Coupe Napoleon was Ettore Bugatti’s personal car, one of just six Royales built, and is estimated to be worth around $50 million. Firing this thing up is always a risk, but especially right now, as all 12.7 liters of its eight cylinders are to be flooded with a brand-new sustainable fuel. If something goes wrong, this will be expensive.
Yet Saudi Aramco’s Fuel Research Center Director Pierre-Olivier Calendini is calm. “We started the technical assessment of sustainable fuel in 1970,” he explains. “What is interesting with this fuel is that you can blend whatever you want. It’s just a renewable hydrocarbon, it’s not like ethanol, where if you increase the ethanol content, then you are going out of the fuel specification.”
In this specific case, the blend has been specifically designed for classic cars. In fact, the entire field at The Le Mans Classic ran on it.
“It is a very specific fuel for classic cars without ethanol to ensure the reliability of the car. We have also developed fuel for Formula Two and Formula Three, supplying them since 2023, and this year we had a chance to launch an almost 100 percent sustainable fuel compliant with the FIA regulation into this category. We are also working very hard to develop fuel for Formula One. We partner with Aston Martin and Honda, and we will supply them starting next year with a new fuel regulation, with so-called 100 percent sustainable fuel certified by the FIA.”
Saudi Aramco has a pilot plant in Spain and is building another in Saudi Arabia. Currently, the fuels use ethanol from bio-waste as the base hydrocarbon, but in the future will switch the plants over to fully synthetic e-fuels with hydrogen extracted from water and carbon captured from the atmosphere.
“Ultimately, what we are looking for is to develop renewable hydrocarbons from the E-fuel process. So it’s a renewable electricity that will produce renewable hydrogen. We combine that with CO2, and we get renewable hydrocarbons,” says Calendini. Currently, Aramco is synthesizing hydrocarbons from ethanol with a different process. “When our (e-fuel) facility is ready to produce, we will just swap, and it will be the same fuel quality.”
Calendini refuses to be drawn on an exact timeline, suggesting it will be decades before such fuel replaces oil-based gas at the pumps. “We are speaking about 50 percent in 2050, so it gives you an order of magnitude of the necessary time to build the production. It will take some decades to come at large scale.”
Neither does he like the phrase carbon-neutral. “I don’t know exact definition of carbon-neutral, because the fact is, nothing is carbon-neutral whatever you do,” he says. Even if the fuel itself only produces the same carbon it was produced from, there’s the infrastructure supporting its creation and delivery that has to be considered.
“During this interview, we release CO2, so it’s not a carbon-neutral interview, even if we are both fully renewable,” he quips.
As for the potentially pricey experiment, the Royale fires immediately in the workshop of the spectacular Schlumpf Collection and runs almost silently despite the insane size of its engine. There are a few puffs of black smoke from this century-old work of art, but it potters out and effortlessly laps the museum’s small oval test track, giving rides—right up until the fuel runs out.