Germany and E.U. Agree to Exception in Planned Ban on Combustion Engines

The German government has reached an agreement with the European Union to allow the sale of vehicles that burn fuels made from renewable energy past 2035, resolving a dispute that threatened to upset a key element of the bloc’s path to climate neutrality.

Volker Wissing, Germany’s minister for transportation, said on Saturday that Berlin had won assurances from negotiators that the rules for new vehicles would be technology neutral, allowing carbon-neutral synthetic fuels, known as e-fuels, to be used. Germany had been pushing for an exception to the E.U.’s proposed 2035 ban on internal combustion engines.

“This paves the way for vehicles with combustion engines that only use CO2-neutral fuels to be newly registered after 2035,” Mr. Volker Wissing said.

“In a first step, a vehicle category of e-fuels-only is to be created and subsequently integrated into the fleet limit regulation,” he said. The full process is to be completed by the fall of 2024, he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/business/germany-eu-climate-combustion-engines.html