Solar Jet Fuel

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

Maybe this is the future of thermal solar.

By 2030, Synhelion plans to have roughly 100 small plants in operation producing around 5 megatons of solar fuel a year using a solar version of the traditional reforming process, a well developed research field. The company plans to begin rolling this out commercially in 2022 at an estimated fuel cost between 50 cents and $1 per litre. https://www.solarpaces.org/how-much-land-would-solar-thermochemistry-need-to-make-all-our-aviation-fuel/

 

 

[Meredith Poor + 883]

The IEA says that the world uses about 600 quadrillion BTUs of energy per year. The US EIA says the US uses 100 quads.

Any of the five largest states in Australia, taken alone, could power the entire world with its solar resources. The square would be about 450 miles on a side.

[BradleyPNW + 282]

Good, that means we get to keep jet travel in the long term one way or the other. If the world requires clean fuel through legislation we'll have it available. 

 

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

The cost of jet fuel (kerosene) at the airport will depend on the whole infrastructure, not just the cost of production. Currently, kerosene is produced in refineries as part of a fine-tuned product mix and then shipped via a shared fuel infrastructure (pipelines, tanks, trucks...) to airports. The cost of fossil kerosene will (maybe) increase as the world moves away from gasoline and diesel, and the cost of dedicated solar==>kerosene plus its infrastructure may make it attractive. Meanwhile, the cost of electricity, H2, and/or E==>CH4 will decrease. At some point, it may become more economical to produce kerosene on site at each airport than it is to ship it from Australia (or wherever). The tradeoff is that electricity, H2, and/or E==>CH4 will use the same infrastructure as the evolved electric grid, so (among other things) the kerosene-producing convertors can operate on cheaper input. This is much less efficient than the dedicated solar==>kerosene system from a pure energy standpoint, but uses shared resources and can use electricity from any source.