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Producing fuels from 1,500 degrees of solar heat: world’s first plant opens in Germany
(www.thechemicalengineer.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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I‘m not particularly hyped about synthetic fuels, but the application to low-carbon cement seems important to me, if this is possible at the scale required
There are plenty of applications where batteries simply won't be sufficient, so synthetic fuels do have a place. Just not in land based transport.
Is agriculture land based transport? Short of an actual nuclear tractor, nothing but diesel has the energy density sufficient to run modern scale farms.
Chatting around the fire we've tried to imagine a solution like dragging a cable but with tractors pushing close to 1000HP now that's about a megawatt. That's a long, fat cable or an extremely dangerous voltage to drag around a field, probably both. And an insane grid infrastructure to get power to the field borders.
You wouldn't believe how much fuel goes into agriculture, to the point where I believe it makes up nearly a third of emissions (possibly including land clearing, can't remember the details). Synthetic fuels are the only net-zero option.
Well I'm kind of a fan of the nuclear tractor honestly but I kind of doubt it :)