Sunlight derived fuel could help decarbonise aviation sector

The team has implemented the system in the field and describe their findings in the journal Joule.

“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 Aldo Steinfeld, a professor from ETH Zurich and the corresponding author of the paper. Previous attempts to produce aviation fuels with solar energy have mostly been lab-based.

The aviation sector, which accounts for about five per cent of global anthropogenic emissions, relies heavily on kerosene, or jet fuel, which is typically derived from crude oil. Currently, no clean alternative is available to power long-haul commercial flights at the 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 said in a statement. “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.”