Solar energy could be key to making sustainable aviation fuel

A new way of making sustainable aviation fuel that could cut the reliance on used cooking oil as a feedstock has been developed by a team of engineers led by the University of Sheffield. The new technique captures CO2 from the air, combines it with hydrogen, and then heats it using concentrated solar energy to produce the fuel. For their study published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers used comprehensive computer modeling and simulation to understand how and where this first-of-a-kind technology could function at an industrial scale.