Recycling and Reusing Carbon in Jet Fuel

Dean Sigler Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), is recycling and reusing CO2 to make jet fuel as part of a carbon-neutral process.  This is not a new idea, with others’ approaches to this detailed in earlier blog entries here, here, and here. Centered on a solar collector/reactor on the roof of ETH’s Machine Laboratory building in Zurich, researchers have “developed a novel technology that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels exclusively from sunlight and air and have demonstrated the entire thermochemical process chain under real field conditions.” Extracting CO2 and water directly from ambient air through an adsorption/desorpton process, the system feeds these free materials into a solar reactor that is at the focus of the parabolic reflector that heats them to 1,500° Celsius. A cerium oxide structure in the reactor enables a redox (oxidation-reduction reaction)* cycle, with syngas an end product.  This gas can be processed into a commercially-viable hydrocarbon fuel through conventional methanol or Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, according to GreenCarCongress. …