“Conventional fuel is energy that you just take from the ground, so you have to put in very little energy in the process, but for any renewable fuel that goes through a closed cycle, you have to put all the energy in that you get out of the heating value of the fuel. So you need at least a certain factor of energy input just to create a heating value and then more energy to compensate for energy losses in the process. In the end, even though our process is very efficient, it’s the cost of the fuel that makes it competitive on the market or not,” Sizmann said.
At the 20 percent efficiency level, the sunlight gas could compete with oil priced at $200 per barrel. That may not sound like a dramatic improvement until you consider that the availability of oil is what determines the cost, not the harm that fossil fuels do the climate or the role that they play in propping up nondemocratic regimes. The sunlight fuel provides a clear advantage over other types of biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, since it wouldn’t compete with usable farmland, just flat and dry desert. “We found our process can be nine times as efficient as bio to liquid,” said Sizmann.
Recently, the Navy announced that they had successfully turned seawater into fuel. Sizmann sees the Solar-Jet kerosene as a complimentary product, not direct competition. “For [the Navy], it’s security of supply. We’re addressing a future problem of sustainability for aviation and mobility as a whole. We’re looking at the substation of fossil kerosene at a large scale and its economic viability,” he said
RIELPOLITIK 