Switzerland’s national airline SWISS will use sustainable fuel manufactured with solar energy for its regular flight operations at Hamburg Airport, Germany.
Swiss-based clean tech company Synhelion has delivered a 190-litre barrel of synthetic crude oil from its DAWN production facility, which launched last year, to a refinery in Northern Germany. The oil, made using solar energy, was processed into Jet-A-1 aviation fuel.
The fuel was then fed into SWISS’s flight operations infrastructure via the fuel supply system at the airport.
“This is the first time that solar fuel has been used in civil aviation,” said SWISS CEO Jens Fehlinger.
Synhelion produces the fuel at its DAWN facility in Jülich, which features a 20m-high solar tower and mirror field, which contains a receiver, a thermochemical reactor, and thermal energy storage.
Solar radiation is reflected by the mirror field, concentrated onto the receiver, and converted into high-temperature process heat. The generated heat is fed to the thermochemical reactor that produces syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
Syngas is then processed by standard gas-to-liquids technology into fuels, such as jet fuel, gasoline, or diesel. The process can be made continuous by using excess heat saved in the thermal energy storage.
“Sustainable fuels are a key lever in reducing air transport’s reliance on fossil fuels,” said Philipp Furler, co-founder and co-CEO of Synhelion…
