Energy

All-in-one solar tower produces jet fuel from CO2, water and sunlight

All-in-one solar tower produces jet fuel from CO2, water and sunlight
Taking sunlight, water and carbon dioxide as inputs, this solar tower in Spain produces carbon-neutral jet fuel and diesel
Taking sunlight, water and carbon dioxide as inputs, this solar tower in Spain produces carbon-neutral jet fuel and diesel
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Taking sunlight, water and carbon dioxide as inputs, this solar tower in Spain produces carbon-neutral jet fuel and diesel
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Taking sunlight, water and carbon dioxide as inputs, this solar tower in Spain produces carbon-neutral jet fuel and diesel
Porous structure made of ceria
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Porous structure made of ceria
The 50-kW pilot reactor, installed in Spain, uses heat from a concentrating solar tower to drive a thermochemical redox cycle
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The 50-kW pilot reactor, installed in Spain, uses heat from a concentrating solar tower to drive a thermochemical redox cycle
Schematic of the solar reactor for splitting water and carbon dioxide through the ceria-based thermochemical redox cycle
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Schematic of the solar reactor for splitting water and carbon dioxide through the ceria-based thermochemical redox cycle
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Taking carbon dioxide, water and sunlight as its only inputs, this solar thermal tower in Spain produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel. Built and tested by researchers at ETH Zurich, it's a promising clean fuel project.

Why do we need sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)?

Fossil fuels can be replaced with batteries or hydrogen in cars and trucks – but aircraft are trickier. With more than 25,000 commercial airliners in service today, and service lifetimes around 25 years, airlines are looking to carbon-neutral fuels to bring down their emissions. It's a transitional step, but an important one until clean aviation tech is ready and the entire global fleet can be converted to something else.

Carbon-neutral fuels are drop-in replacements for today's kerosene Jet-A fuel; they mix in with regular fuel and get burned in jet engines as per normal, producing the normal amount of carbon emissions. The difference is that rather than pulling that carbon straight out of the ground, carbon-neutral fuels grab CO2 from elsewhere; it'll still end up in the atmosphere, but at least it does some useful work before it gets there, and every gallon burned is a gallon of conventional fuel that wasn't burned.

How is SAF currently made?

There are a lot of ways to make carbon-neutral fuels – and not all of those are acceptable for other reasons. Biofuels grown from specially raised corn crops, for example, create their own emissions, from fertilizers and farm equipment, and they use land that could otherwise be producing food. Chopping down forests and using the wood as biomass is also out, for reasons that should be obvious, but the fact that there are rules in place around this suggests that even in the sustainability game, there are still bad-faith operators.

Landfill waste-to-jet-fuel plants are popping up here and there, taking municipal garbage or old cooking oil and using that as a feedstock to create syngas, which can be refined into synthetic fuels. But the pyrolysis process usually involved requires a lot of energy – either dirty energy or clean energy that could be used elsewhere – and the feedstock is so wildly random that the resulting fuels sometimes need an extra, energy-intensive cleaning step before they're ready to go save the planet in a Dreamliner.

Another way is to capture carbon directly from other emissions sources, and convert that into fuel. This can be done by using green electricity to power an electrolyzer, then mixing the resulting hydrogen with carbon monoxide to create syngas, which can then be refined into fuels – but there are energy losses at each of these steps.

Which brings us to this new, much simpler design out of ETH Zurich, which has been built and tested at the IMDEA Energy Institute in Spain.

The 50-kW pilot reactor, installed in Spain, uses heat from a concentrating solar tower to drive a thermochemical redox cycle
The 50-kW pilot reactor, installed in Spain, uses heat from a concentrating solar tower to drive a thermochemical redox cycle

ETH Zurich's all-in-one carbon-neutral fuel tower

This pilot plant runs on concentrating solar thermal energy. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy – about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas.

This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel – proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels.

Schematic of the solar reactor for splitting water and carbon dioxide through the ceria-based thermochemical redox cycle
Schematic of the solar reactor for splitting water and carbon dioxide through the ceria-based thermochemical redox cycle

How much fuel does it make?

This is the big question, really, and I'm afraid the research paper doesn't make this information easy to divine. Overall, the researchers ran the system for nine days, running six to eight cycles a day, weather permitting. Each cycle lasted an average of 53 minutes, and the total experimental time was 55 hours. Several cycles had to be stopped due to overheating, when temperatures in the reactor rose past the targeted 1,450 °C (2,642 °F) to a critical temperature of 1,500 °C (2,732 °F).

In total, the experimental pilot plant produced around 5,191 liters (1,371 gal) of syngas over those nine days, but the researchers don't indicate exactly how much kerosene and diesel this became after the syngas was processed, so we can't give a simple figure for this pilot plant's output per day. Even if we could, it might not scale up in a linear fashion.

But to give you a sense of the size of the problem here, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner has a fuel capacity up to 126,372 L (36,384 gal), on which it can fly up to 14,140 km (8,786 miles) – roughly the distance from New York to Ho Chi Minh City. And there are tens of thousands of commercial aircraft out there flying multiple missions per day.

But these things don't necessarily have to replace all the fuel in question – synthetic fuel can be blended with regular fuel in whatever quantities it's available, and every bit helps reduce overall emissions.

Where to from here?

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure.

“We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system,” said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. “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."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

The research is open access in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.

Source: ETH Zurich

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11 comments
11 comments
The Doubter
A welcome diversion from the usual solar power routes. Seems a promising new direction
Expanded Viewpoint
Hmmph, I'm not anywhere near being convinced that this is any kind of a viable mechanism for generating fuels for gas turbine engines or Diesel engines. They have to come out with TOTAL transparency of ALL their "facts and figures", and not try to hide anything from us. The more the data is obscured, the more red flags I see popping up.
jzj
Tough article to cogently write, thanks for taking a very good swing at it. As a reminder, "neutral," not "clean." Also, remarkable glossing over of where the CO2 comes from -- not a gimme.
Karmudjun
Nice article Loz. More "Pin-in-the-sky" theory and questions about scalability. But just like all research, incremental improvements in each technology and even a new hypothesis to explore different modes of carbon capture will help reduce the excessive burden of CO2 in our 'runaway' green house gas induced climate change. If they can scale this up - and couple it with cheaply produced or already captured CO2, it could make a dent in continued fossil fuel CO2 release. Instead of additive - it will make the produced fuel a recyclable CO2 emitter - at what efficiency? Hard to guess, but thanks for the synopsis.
Bucky
This system runs on pure H2O and 99.9 pure CO2 and uses pure Argon and Cerium
TheCO2 and deionized H2O are consumed in the process but take a lot of energy to make.
Argon also takes a lot of energy to extract from the air or output gasses, which has to be repeated after use.
Cerium is a rare-earth element mined in China, which is reused, but the ceramics will have to be recycled regularly.
The efficiency of the reduction phase is 4%, but the reduction of cerium oxide back to ceria, seems to be not included in the equation.
I am not convinced this will be a solution.
jayedwin98020
Why not solve all of this 'jet fuel' problem, and just develop 'hydrogen powered' aircraft.
Zero emissions and virtually unlimited resources to draw from.

(Ref. articles on "New Atlas" regarding same, i.e.: Hypoint's turbo air-cooled fuel cell technology •
ZeroAvia • Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories (GTL) Ultra-lightweight cryogenic storage tanks.)
Maggie Sanchez
ok
Maggie Sanchez
Hmmph, I'm not anywhere near being convinced that this is any kind of a viable mechanism for generating fuels for gas turbine engines or Diesel engines. They have to come out with TOTAL transparency of ALL their "facts and figures", and not try to hide anything from us. The more the data is obscured, the more red flags I see popping up.
Eggbones
@jayedwin98020 because fleet replacement would bankrupt the airlines. Even in good years like 2019, most of them were losing money. They're terrible businesses.
martinwinlow
Well, you know the old adage "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain"... and I hope that's where they plan to put the thousands of plants that Spain (alone) would need to make enough synthetic fuel to even begin to make a dent in fossil fuel-derived jetfuel. You see, no-one has mentioned how much water would be needed to make this idea viable and the last time I looked Spain is not blessed with an endless supply of fresh water (let alone the pure water this process would need).

In fact it all smacks of the same ill-informed fantasy world that is the idea of solving all our energy woes with hydrogen (H2) as the same *utterly immovable* problem is at play there, too. It takes ~8kg/litres of H2O to make 1kg of H2. I've done the simple sums to convert the UK's total current fossil fuel use to an equivalent amount of fresh water required for the whole daft idea and it comes out at about 5 times the UK's annual fresh water use (I have to wonder why those advocating this stupidity have not done the same sums, too).. We already have a shortage of fresh water here - like just about every other country in the world. I'm guessing a similar amount of water would be involved here.

A much more sensible idea would be to ditch jet aviation and switch it all to (very) high speed electric trains powered near-directly by renewable electricity. Developing the perfectly achievable hyperloop idea would be a much better use of the time, effort and engineering talent than prolonging the death-throws of the oil industry.
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