AVIATION CARBON NEUTRAL GAS

Caurtesy : AVIATION CARBON NEUTRAL GAS

The aviation industry is responsible for approximately 5% of global anthropogenic emissions that cause climate change. It is heavily reliant on kerosene, also known as jet fuel, which is a liquid hydrocarbon fuel derived primarily from crude oil. At the moment, there are no clean options available to power long-haul commercial flights on a global scale.

“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 amount of CO₂ emitted during kerosene combustion in a jet engine equals that consumed during its production in the solar plant,” Steinfeld says. “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.”

Steinfeld and his colleagues proposed a system that uses solar energy to generate drop-in fuels, which are synthetic options for fossil-derived fuels like kerosene and diesel, as part of the European Union’s SUN-to-LIQUID project.

According to Steinfeld, solar-produced kerosene is fully consistent with current aviation infrastructure for fuel storage, allocation, and use in jet engines. He adds that it can also be merged with fossil-derived kerosene.

In 2017, the team began scaling up the design and construction of a solar fuel manufacturing plant at the IMDEA Energy Institute in Spain. The plant is made up of 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that redirect and concentrate solar radiation into a tower-mounted solar reactor. The concentrated solar energy then powers oxidation-reduction (redox) reaction cycles in the solar reactor’s porous ceria structure.

The ceria, which is not absorbed but can be reused, transforms the water and CO₂ injected into the reactor into syngas, a customized mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Syngas is then fed into a gas-to-liquid converter, where it is converted into liquid hydrocarbon fuels such as kerosene and diesel.