This Solar Tower Can Transform Water, Sunlight, and Carbon Dioxide Into Jet Fuel
10th August 2022
Aldo Steinfeld, a professor at ETH Zürich’s Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, says his system for converting ambient air into jet-ready kerosene fuel using a solar refinery tower isn’t science fiction. It’s simply thermodynamics.
In a two-year proof-of-concept test atop ETH Zürich’s Machine Laboratory building in Switzerland back in 2019, Steinfeld’s mini solar refinery first showed how the process works, and laid the groundwork to scale the project. Both carbon dioxide (CO2) and water are extracted directly from ambient air and split using solar energy, as Steinfeld describes his work in a new paper, published late last month in the journal Joule. The result is syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is then processed into kerosene.