This Swiss fuel requires no special transportation, storage facilities or jet engines to use: Researchers in Switzerland are the first to produce the fuel in a power generator rather than a lab.
The amount of synthetic jet fuel it emits when it combusts in a plane’s engine equals the amount consumed during its production in a solar plant, thus making it carbon neutral.
The fuel will be even greener if the team can capture carbon dioxide from the air in the not-too-distant future and use it in the fuel.
The amount of synthetic jet fuel it emits when it combusts in a plane’s engine equals the amount consumed during its production in a solar plant, thus making it carbon neutral.
I keep reading that sentence, but it still doesn’t make any sense. Jet engines don’t emit jet fuel, at least if they are working correctly. Fuel leaks are generally a bad scene, particularly at 30,000 feet. Also, why would a solar plant consume jet fuel? That is what the sentence seems to say.
They might be referring to energy, or CO2, but those don’t make a lot of sense either. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics must always be dealt with.
As paulecker mentioned, the Fischer–Tropsch process has been around for decades. It works, but is not very efficient if you need to make H2 and CO from water and CO2, in order to make it green.
I believe the jet fuel referred to in the statement is after “it combusts in a plane’s engine” and not while it is manufactured. The process is recapturing CO2 that is already in the atmosphere and the use of solar energy will not add to the present pollution levels.
Nice idea, but we know the oil from coal (via synthesis gas) process used by the Germans in WWII was not economical after the war. Maybe processes have improved but this will require lots of capital and lots of cheap energy.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220720121020.htm
“With our solar technology, we have shown that we can produce synthetic kerosene from water and CO2 instead of deriving it from fossil fuels”…The solar-made kerosene is fully compatible with the existing aviation infrastructure for fuel storage, distribution, and end use in jet engines, Steinfeld says. It can also be blended with fossil-derived kerosene, he adds.
In 2017, the team started scaling up the design and built a solar fuel-production plant at IMDEA Energy Institute in Spain. The plant consists of 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that redirect and concentrate solar radiation into a solar reactor mounted on top of a tower. The concentrated solar energy then drives oxidation-reduction (redox) reaction cycles in the solar reactor, which contains a porous structure made of ceria…Subsequently, syngas is sent into a gas-to-liquid converter, where it is finally processed into liquid hydrocarbon fuels that include kerosene and diesel…
During a nine-day run of the plant reported in the paper, the solar reactor’s energy efficiency – the portion of solar energy input that is converted into the energy content of the syngas produced – was around 4%. Steinfeld says his team is working intensively on improving the design to increase the efficiency to values over 15%.