Engineers Use Solar Radiation To Turn Water Into Carbon-Neutral Jet Fuel

Spectrum

Engineers have managed to create a carbon-neutral synthesis of kerosene, or jet fuel, by combining water with sunlight.

Currently, at least 5% of human emissions are created through aviation kerosene use, and at the moment, there is no alternative for long haul jetting.

Consisting of 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that can concentrate and redirect solar radiation into a solar reactor was built on top of a tower at the IMDEA Energy Institute in Madrid in 2017.

Once it’s produced, this concentrated solar energy then creates an oxidation-reduction (redox) reaction cycles in the solar reactor. From here, syngas – which is made of hydrogen and carbon monoxide –  is created through a porous structure by injecting water and carbon dioxide into the reactor.


This syngas is placed into a gas-to-liquid converter where in its final process, is made into liquid hydrocarbon fuels including diesel and kerosene.

Should the team manage to capture carbon dioxide from the air in the future, then the fuel will be considered even “greener” when used later on.

Professor from ETH Zurich and author of the paper, Aldo Steinfeld, shared, “The amount of CO2 emitted during kerosene combustion in a jet engine equals that consumed during its production in the solar plant. That makes the fuel carbon neutral, especially if we use CO2 captured directly from the air as an ingredient, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.”

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This solar-made jet fuel, or kerosene, is said to be fully compatible with the way fuel is stored, distributed, and used already these days in a plane’s engine. The team also shared that the fuel can also be blended with fossil-derived kerosene.

Steinfeld also shared, “With our solar technology, we have shown that we can produce synthetic kerosene from water and CO2 instead of deriving it from fossil fuels.” Moreover, the team also said that they are the first to demonstrate this entire thermochemical process chain that changes water to kerosene.


As reported in the paper published in Joule, during a nine-day run of the plant, the solar reactor’s energy efficiency was around 4%, which is the part of the solar energy input that is converted into the energy content of the syngas that’s produced.

Steinfeld also shares that his team is working exhaustively to improve on the design in order to increase the efficiency to values above 15%. For one, they are looking into ways to optimize the porous structure for absorbing solar radiation and creating methods to recover the heart that’s usually released during the redox cycles.

Steinfeld added, “This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels.”

 

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