Jülich (dpa/lnw) – A plant for the production of CO2-neutral solar fuel for aircraft is currently being built in Jülich. It converts carbon into liquid fuel using devices that focus extremely powerful solar energy, Synhelion said. It is a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The company uses the DLR infrastructure in Jülich.
Christina Foerster, Member of the Executive Board of the Lufthansa Group, and Dieter Vranckx, Head of the Lufthansa subsidiary Swiss International Air Lines, also attended the presentation of the solar fuel test facility in Jülich on Thursday. The Swiss airline is to be the first airline to fly with solar kerosene from Synhelion by 2024.
Industrial production is scheduled to start in Jülich from 2023. The first commercial production plant is planned by 2025 in Spain, where solar energy is certainly available. By 2030, the company is aiming for a production capacity of 875 million liters of fuel per year, “that corresponds to around seven percent of the annual German aviation fuel requirement”.
In the test facility, a mirror field is used that reflects solar radiation onto a solar receiver. There, the concentrated solar radiation is converted into process heat of over 1500 degrees and used to produce liquid fuel from various carbon sources.
