Efficient Production of Solar Fuel Using Existing Large Scale Production Technologies
article
Global energy consumption will at least double during this century. Today about 80% of the primary energy used is provided by fossil fuels. To avoid anthropogenic climate change, it is essential that the world’s energy system is gradually transformed from fossil energy based to a solar based one. In such a solar world, efficient energy storage is prerequisite to deal with the intermittency of this abundant source. Storage in the form of chemical energy, that is, solar fuels, provides a natural route to deal with this problem. An obvious solar fuel would be hydrogen, which can be produced efficiently from solar energy through direct splitting of water or through combination of solar electricity production with electrolysis of water.1 Unfortunately, hydrogen has a major disadvantage as its transport and storage is not trivial. No such storage problem exists for alcohols or liquid hydrocarbons. Especially liquid hydrocarbons are preferred solar fuels in view of their unprecedented combination of gravimetric and volumetric energy density and theworldwide existing markets and infrastructure.
TNO Identifier
847733
Publisher
ECN
Collation
3 p.
Place of publication
Petten
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