The actual news here is that a research group has developed a new greener way to generate synthesis gas (the standard way is to inject water or steam into a chamber of burning coal).<p>Once you have the synthesis gas, there are existing methods to manufacture a wide range of chemical products. Jet fuel being just one of them.
We'd still need tens of thousands of these plants. From [0] it's mentioned that<p>> According to Andreas Sizmann, SOLAR-JET project coordinator at BHL, a solar reactor with a 1 km2 solar field could generate 20,000 L/d of kerosene, which could fly a large 300-body commercial airliner for about seven hours.<p>According to [1] there are about 10000 planes in the air at any moment (excluding private jets, military, and cargo planes):<p>> Back in 2017, FlightAware determined there to be an average of 9,728 commercial airplanes in the sky at any given time. Of course, that number fluctuates on a minute-by-minute basis, given that planes are nearly constantly taking off and landing.<p>Doing the math of 10000 × (24 ÷ 7) gives us 35285 of these one square kilometer plants, or about 12% of the area of the entire state of Nevada.<p>So it might be actually doable from a back of the envelope math analysis, but it'd be quite a big endeavor to scale a facility that large.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/first-kerosene-made-from-solar-syngas/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/first-kerosene-made...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of-planes-in-air" rel="nofollow">https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...</a>
One important thing to call out about these fuels, and is often neglected in the reporting, is while they might be carbon neutral, they aren't environmentally neutral. At the very least, these fuels will still emit NOx and particulate pollution, so you cannot simply wave away all environment concerns of flying with "synthetic fuels".
<p><pre><code> Only four percent of the captured solar energy was converted into chemical energy in the syngas, although they see a route to increasing that to above 15 percent
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Seems like a fairly significant problem. The level of investment required to make this work at scale would probably be in the same ballpark as replacing the system with high speed rail wouldn't it?
Where is the (pure ?) CO2 needed from such a plant typically sourced from ? Does it have to be captured at a gaz / coal power plant exhaust ? Or would it make sense to use CO2 captured from atmosphere (once the tech matters ?)
The military application would be quite interesting. Nuclear powered aircraft carrier has abundant energy which could be used to produce jet fuel. It would simplify the logistics, which is critical in the times of war.
How much energy does it take to produce 1 gallon of jet fuel? Could you have a small nuclear plant and have that provide enough fuel an airport?<p>How much aviation fuel could a 100 MW power plant produce?
I do wonder whether zeppelin's have any future as a practical mode of transport, either of goods or people. Intuitively, seems like it could trade speed for efficiency.
It is a neat process and I hope they develop it further, but it is yet another example of the kind of thing people cling to so as to avoid recognising that part of net zero requires behavioural changes.<p>"Despite the facility taking up space equivalent to a small car park, it was only able to produce just over 5,000 liters of syngas in 9 days. "<p>In other words, if this was our only way of powering flight, flight would become enormously uncommon and staggeringly expensive. Even if they achieved their stated aim of 15% efficiency, there's no sane hope of scaling this. It is just yet another example of tech that we cling to in the hope of not changing our lifestyles. Neat, but not the answer.
Given that this process must manufacture carbon monoxide to serve as an ingredient, I wonder if it could be installed on some CO-emitting equipment to capture and benefit from it.
It doesn't sequester carbon, doesn't lower the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere if done in big scale, even if in the long run could lower the demand for extracting new oil.<p>We are in a red queen's race, carbon neutral is not enough, we might not have time for a long run.
What’s the endgame here?<p>$3,000 “carbon neutral” coach class tickets from LA -> NYC?<p>I’m being a little ridiculous but I legitimately don’t get it.<p>Tech like this only works under some carbon credit scheme that provides no value and just transfers wealth to the inventors of these Rube Goldberg machines and their already wealthy investors.