Paper presented to the 3rd Southern African Solar Energy Conference, South Africa, 11-13 May, 2015.
Displacing petroleum-derived fuels with renewable solar
fuels offers an opportunity to harness the earth’s most abundant
energy resource, to reduce anthropogenic emissions of
greenhouse gases, and to meet an expanding global demand for
fuel. This paper presents near-term and forward looking paths
to produce solar fuels using concentrated solar energy as the
source of process heat to drive thermochemical processes.
Solar gasification of biomass is presented as an important
stepping stone toward the goal of thermochemical metal oxide
redox cycles to split water and carbon dioxide.
