It's a smart way to make propellent that cuts back on carbon-intensive processes in flying.
At first glance, you might think the structure tucked away in a Madrid suburb is a solar power plant. Perched in an industrial park, the facility features an audience of solar reflectors—mirrors that concentrate blinding sunlight to the top of a tower.
Though the tower is new, the underlying process isn’t a recent invention; two chemists—named, naturally, Fischer and Tropsch—pioneered it in Germany nearly a century ago. But it’s historically been something of an afterthought. You need some source of that carbon monoxide: typically coal, natural gas, or their byproducts. It’s useful if you have limited access to petroleum, but less helpful if you’re trying to clean up the transport sector.
That’s where 169 solar reflectors beam sunlight into the picture. Atop the 50-foot-tall structure, their light—on average, 2,500 times brighter than the sun—strikes a porous ceramic box made from cerium, the rare-earth element number 58. That draws water and carbon dioxide from the air and splits their atoms into hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide., an engineer at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and one of the paper authors.
In that plant, the newly created gases sink to the bottom of the tower, where they enter a shipping container that carries out the Fischer-Tropsch reactions. The end result is fossil-fuel-free kerosene, produced by pulling carbon dioxide from the air. The researchers say it can be pumped into fuel tanks, today, without issue.
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