Research teams at SZTE’s Greennovation Center, led by Professor Doctor Csaba Janáky within the University of Szeged’s Center of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Research, Development, and Innovation (IKIKK), have been awarded HUF 2 billion (€5.5 million) to fund the development of energy efficient, artificial production of CO2-based e-fuels.
Further Development of Mission-Driven National Laboratories was launched by the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund as a continuation of the National Laboratories Program. Through this, Professor Janáky brought one of the most successful National Laboratory for Renewable Energy (MENL) projects to completion at the end of April 2026: green energy technology development with a low environmental footprint, as well as technologies for the production, storage and utilisation of hydrogen and CO2. The new project will use this research to work towards producing liquid e-fuels such as e-kerosene and e-gasoline.
Professor Doctor Csaba Janák, Head of SZTE IKIKK’s Competence Center for Materials Science, Environmental Science, and Energy Science and Scientific Director of MENL, commented: “There are several routes to producing e-fuels: different chemical processes can turn carbon dioxide, water and renewable electricity into synthetic liquid fuels. We tested a number of these within the framework of the National Laboratory Program and will now focus on the route that delivered the best results. The next step is to improve its efficiency further by refining the key process – the Fischer-Tropsch reaction – and optimising the surrounding processes. The innovation lies in how we bring the individual stages together, rather than in producing fuels from CO2 and water using renewable electricity. In practice, manufacturers typically acquire the technologies for producing hydrogen, carbon monoxide and e-fuels separately and then try to integrate them into a single system; the result is often lower-than-expected efficiency and excessive energy use. For a chemist or chemical engineer, this comes as no surprise: each technology operates most efficiently under its own specific conditions, including temperature and pressure. Simply buying these technologies separately and connecting them can lead to substantial energy losses between stages. Our goal now is to build a system in which the individual technologies work efficiently together. Each has its own optimal operating conditions, and the more closely we can align them, the less energy we lose between stages. This is where we see the greatest opportunity to improve the efficiency of the process as a whole. We will first bring the components together at laboratory scale, then move the complete process to the test station, using our existing equipment. The next step will be to build a new containerised system that converts hydrogen and carbon monoxide into liquid fuel with high energy efficiency. By the end of the project, we aim to have a process that performs well at every stage, from electricity input to e-fuel production, giving us the expertise to approach industrial partners.”
