Abstract
The solar thermochemical fuel pathway offers the possibility to defossilize the transportation sector by producing renewable fuels that emit significantly less greenhouse gases than conventional fuels over the whole life cycle. Especially for the aviation sector, the availability of renewable liquid hydrocarbon fuels enables climate impact goals to be reached. In this paper, both the geographical potential and life-cycle fuel production costs are analyzed. The assessment of the geographical potential of solar thermochemical fuels excludes areas based on sustainability criteria such as competing land use, protected areas, slope, or shifting sands. On the remaining suitable areas, the production potential surpasses the current global jet fuel demand by a factor of more than fifty, enabling all but one country to cover its own demand. In many cases, a single country can even supply the world demand for jet fuel. A dedicated economic model expresses the life-cycle fuel production costs as a function of the location, taking into account local financial conditions by estimating the national costs of capital. It is found that the lowest production costs are to be expected in Israel, Chile, Spain, and the USA, through a combination of high solar irradiation and low-level capital costs. The thermochemical energy conversion efficiency also has a strong influence on the costs, scaling the size of the solar concentrator. Increasing the efficiency from 15% to 25%, the production costs are reduced by about 20%. In the baseline case, the global jet fuel demand could be covered at costs between 1.58 and 1.83 €/L with production locations in South America, the United States, and the Mediterranean region. The flat progression of the cost-supply curves indicates that production costs remain relatively constant even at very high production volumes.
Highlights
A goal set for this century is the transition of the transportation sector from a fossil energy base to a renewable one
The results shown above, reflect a change in estimated investment costs, in weighted average cost of capital (WACC), and inflation rates across countries
A geographic information system (GIS)-based methodology was developed to indicate the suitable areas for the production of solar fuels, whereas non-suitable areas were excluded based on criteria of existing land use such as agriculture or pastureland, slope, shifting sands, and protected areas
Summary
A goal set for this century is the transition of the transportation sector from a fossil energy base to a renewable one This goal is mainly motivated by the necessity to limit climate change through a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions and by the limited long-term supply security of fossil fuels. This transition is very challenging to achieve as today by far the largest share of the energy used in this sector is provided by fossil fuels [1] and a switch to a radically different technology will necessarily involve large investments into infrastructure and propulsion technology [2]. For aviation, a transition to hydrogen or batteries is not as easy to implement as for cars because of the much stricter requirements for low weight and the volume of the energy
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