Fuel Production Systems for Remote Areas via an Aluminum Energy Vector

Abstract

Autonomous fuel synthesis in remote locations remains the Holy Grail of fuel delivery logistics. The burdened cost of delivering fuel to remote locations is often significantly more expensive than the purchase price. Here it is shown that newly developed solid aluminum metal fuel is suited for remote production of liquid diesel fuels. On a volumetric basis, aluminum has more than twice the energy of diesel fuel, making it a superb structural energy vector for remote applications. Once aluminum is treated with gallium, water of nearly any purity is used to rapidly oxidize the aluminum metal which spontaneously evolves hydrogen and heat in roughly equal energetic quantities. The benign byproduct of the reaction could, in theory, be taken to an off-site facility and recycled back into aluminum using standard smelting processes or it could be left on-site as a high-value waste. The hydrogen can easily be used as a feedstock for diesel fuel, via Fischer–Tropsch (FT) reaction mechanisms, while the heat can be l...