Capacity is not the bottleneck. Bankable demand is.

Five talks at the Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 – on China, on the global eFuel project pipeline, on methanol, on methanol-to-jet and on an airline’s defossilisation roadmap – came from very different angles. Put side by side, they tell one story.

Electrification alone does not solve the oil problem

The overview talk on China by JSC Automotive delivered the most uncomfortable number of the day, and it had nothing to do with climate targets. China has supported electric cars more aggressively than any other country on earth. In 2025, 30 per cent of new passenger cars sold were EVs. And the effect on oil demand has been close to nothing.

The reason is arithmetic, not ideology: petrol demand does not come from new cars, it comes from the existing fleet. JSC Automotive estimates that only around 12 per cent of the cars actually on Chinese roads were electric in 2025. Roughly half of China’s oil consumption is driven by demand for petrol and diesel, and petrochemicals have been pushing the rest upwards since 2010. Fifteen per cent of Chinese petrol is already made from coal-based methanol – a molecule route, chosen for energy security rather than for the climate.

This is why Beijing’s stated logic is worth reading carefully: electrify everything that can be electrified, and use Power-to-X to replace oil and gas where electrification does not reach – ammonia and fertilisers, methanol and chemicals, refining, steel, shipping, aviation and long-duration energy reserves. That is precisely the position of the Swiss Power-to-X Collaborative Innovation Network (SPIN), arrived at from the opposite direction. Renewable fuels do not compete with electrification; they cover what electrification cannot. Anyone still framing this as an efficiency contest between two rival options is arguing about a choice nobody has to make.

One more figure from the same talk deserves attention in Europe: China’s electrolyser manufacturers and plant operators are suffering from overcapacity, with utilisation of only 10 per cent in 2024. Building capacity and using it are two different problems.

The global pipeline is impressive – and almost entirely pre-FID

Porsche Consulting put numbers on that second problem. Around 300 eFuel projects worldwide have announced roughly 20 billion litres of capacity for 2030, and 82 per cent of that capacity is eMethanol.

Then comes the sobering breakdown. Of the announced 2030 capacity, 76 per cent is still at concept or feasibility stage, 14 per cent is in FEED, 6 per cent has reached final investment decision or construction – and less than 0.1 per cent is in operation. Ninety-four per cent of the pipeline sits on the wrong side of the FID line, where execution likelihood is, in the consultants’ own words, limited. The key challenge is financing.

Cost reduction is achievable: eMethanol at 4,146 €/t for a small-scale player in Hamburg falls to 690 €/t for a future market leader operating at 500 kt per year in Patagonia with heat recovery, advanced electrolysers and AI-optimised storage management – an 83 per cent reduction. But cost curves only materialise if somebody finances the first plants, and nobody finances a plant without a buyer.

That is where regulation decides. In the EU, fuel suppliers face eFuel quotas with no target after 2030 and very low volumes; maritime and aviation quotas face IMO head-winds and recurrent revisions; on-road transport has no instrument at all, because eFuels are not eligible.

Switzerland has the instrument the EU lacks

Switzerland is the exception, and this is the strategic point Swiss industry should internalise. Here, car importers can use eFuel credits to meet their CO₂ targets – opening, according to Porsche Consulting, an eMethanol market of around 1.3 Mt and more than 2 billion euros by 2030.

The mechanics are unusually concrete: a penalty of 102 € per gram CO₂/km for missing fleet targets, a 100 per cent exemption from the road fuel tax of 0.79 €/l for certified on-road eFuels, and current ten-year offtake prices for eGasoline of 2.50 to 4.50 €/l. In an exemplary calculation for a premium importer over 2030–2034, buying eFuel credits instead of paying penalties saves 7.9 million euros. Eligible routes include eMethanol as a gasoline blend (limited to 3 per cent under EN 228), methanol-to-gasoline, methanol-to-MTBE (15 per cent blend) and Fischer-Tropsch eDiesel. Methanol-to-jet is not eligible – it is not an on-road fuel.

Two consequences follow. First, Switzerland is today the only market in Europe where an eFuel producer can point a bank at a legally grounded revenue stream; EU eligibility is not expected before 2035. Second, aviation needs a demand instrument of its own, because the Swiss credit market by construction cannot provide one.

Methanol is the hinge

Prof. Markus Friedl of OST explained why the pipeline converges on one molecule. Methanol is liquid at ambient conditions, and its combination of energy per mass, energy per volume and storage system cost makes it a practical candidate for seasonal energy storage – the problem hydrogen solves badly and batteries do not solve at all. It serves as a fuel for combined heat and power and for ships, as a carrier for intercontinental hydrogen transport, as feedstock for SAF and biodiesel, and as a drop-in replacement for grey and brown methanol in the chemical industry, in plastics, coatings, adhesives and textile fibres.

Globally, green methanol is still a rounding error: methanol.org lists 18 bio-methanol and 8 e-methanol plants worldwide. Switzerland’s own build-out is small but real – the Innosuisse flagship GreenHub at the Horgen waste-to-energy plant (35 kW electric, e-methanol and olefins), Green Methanol Zug at 1 MW electric, and Finomics at Getec Park Muttenz at 20 MW electric. Regulation moved too: in October 2025 the threshold for methanol on the exemption list of the Major Accidents Ordinance was raised from 2 to 20 tonnes, and SPIN is working with the Federal Office for the Environment and Powerloop on safety standards for methanol.

From methanol to jet fuel – and the buyer at the end of the chain

Metafuels closed the loop between the methanol pipeline and aviation. Its aerobrew methanol-to-jet process – methanol-to-olefins, oligomerisation, hydroprocessing, fractionation – is now included in ASTM D7566 Annex 5, and accreditation is completed. The demonstration plant is in start-up, and the first-of-a-kind 10 t/day plant at the Evos terminal in the Port of Rotterdam targets FID in Q3 2027 and operation in 2030, with SWISS, Lufthansa, European Energy and Evos among the named partners. The certification problem is solved; the financing problem is not.

At the other end of that chain stood easyJet, with the demand picture. ReFuelEU mandates are in force and apply in Switzerland from 2026, rising from 6 per cent SAF in 2030 to 70 per cent in 2050; the airline is committed to a 35 per cent reduction in emissions intensity by 2035 and to net zero by 2050, buys SAF through offtake agreements with its regular fuel suppliers and is explicitly exploring options to support long-term supply. IATA’s demand curve, cited by Metafuels, runs from 2.7 billion litres in 2025 to 29 billion in 2030 – a tenfold increase in four years, to be supplied by a project pipeline that is 94 per cent pre-FID.

One condition remains non-negotiable from a Power-to-X perspective: e-SAF only makes climate sense when the carbon it contains is recycled CO₂ from biogenic, atmospheric or industrial sources, and when that recycling displaces fossil carbon instead of providing a reason to burn more of it.

What Switzerland should take from this

Read together, the five talks point at a single gap. Technology readiness is no longer the constraint: an ASTM-accredited jet fuel route, a demonstrated methanol platform, an 83 per cent cost reduction pathway and fleet renewal programmes already under way. The constraint is that almost nobody has a contract that makes a plant bankable.

Switzerland holds one instrument that works and one gap that does not. The eFuel credit market gives road transport a demand signal that the EU will not have before 2035 – and it deliberately excludes aviation, the segment where, according to Porsche Consulting’s reading of the European Commission’s impact assessment, 99 per cent of EU energy demand in 2040 will still come from liquid fuel. Closing that gap is not a technology question. It is a regulatory one, and it is ours to answer.

Source: presentations by JSC Automotive, Porsche Consulting, OST, Metafuels and easyJet at the Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026, Kursaal Bern, 22 September 2026. Read our congress recap.

🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.