New Collaboration Sets SWISS to Become First Customer in 2023 for Synhelion’s Sun-to-Liquid Aviation Fuel
by Christopher Surgenor (GreenAir Online) SWISS and the Lufthansa Group have entered into a strategic collaboration with solar aviation fuel pioneer Synhelion, which will enable SWISS to become the first airline to use sun-to-liquid fuel. Synhelion has developed a key technology for producing sustainable aviation fuel using concentrated solar heat to manufacture syngas that can then be synthesised into kerosene using standard industrial processes. Last October, the company announced it had received funding worth €3.92 million ($4.3m) from the Energy Research Program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, which will be used towards building the world’s first industrial plant for solar fuels in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The facility will cover the entire process from concentrated sunlight to synthetic liquid fuel on an industrial scale, with the end products being solar kerosene and solar gasoline. SWISS is set to become the first customer for the solar kerosene in 2023 and under the collaboration will support the development of another commercial facility in Spain.
…
In addition to the German government funding, Synhelion raised a further 16 million Swiss francs ($17.4m) in a Series B funding round last November. A paper by members of Synhelion, ‘Drop-in fuels from sunlight and air’, was published in the journal Nature the same month. READ MORE