Sungas : Opportunities and challenges for solar thermos chemical fuels

Abstract

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.