Session: 19-01: Symposium to Honor Professor Jane Davidson I

Paper Number: 168429

168429 - (Invited) An Honest Reflection on Fuels From Concentrating Sunlight: A Tribute to My Friend and Mentor Jane Davidson 

Abstract: 

Developing fuels from concentrating solar without fossil fuel inputs remains a technical and economic challenge that will be extremely difficult to scale up to the levels needed for significantly impacting global greenhouse gas emissions in the near term.  Noteworthy advances in solar-driven redox cycles for splitting CO2 and/or H2O have been scaled-up to the demonstration plant scale but at solar efficiency levels that raise questions about its economic viability.  While these carbon-neutral approaches motivate significant research and development advances, the timescales for making them economically viable may likely be too long for meeting the need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate rapid climate change over the next two decades.  Prof. Davidson during her career had a clear realization that the priority should be placed on the displacement of carbon in the fuel stream with processes that may have shorter development cycles than fully carbon-neutral solar fuel processes.  This talk, in honor or Prof. Davidson, explores some solar-driven processes that utilize carbonaceous fuels that have the potential of bringing solar energy into fuel production at scale and thereby may reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time scales that can have an impact at the time scales needed to address near term climate change.  

Recent advances in understanding fluidized bed heat transfer, chemical looping, and solar receiver modeling and designs reveal opportunities for ways to use concentrating solar inputs to upgrade biogas, natural gas, and other feedstocks to with captured solar energy and CO₂ to reduce the carbon intensity of liquid fuels or other chemicals that can be produced from syngas.  The possibility of making these processes technically feasible and continuously operational will require thoughtful integration with high-temperature thermal or thermochemical energy storage.  Such chemical process integration can benefit from the advances in particle-based energy storage systems under development around the world.  The use of receiver/reactor models and coupling to solar-field simulations remains critical for reducing the risk of reactor/receiver scale up and for identifying viable operating conditions for particle-based reactors  and for matching solar heating sources with reactor heat demands.  Such reactors will benefit tremendously from high wall heat transfer coefficients that can be sustained by fluidized beds with extended internal surfaces.  This talk will explore the challenges and prospects for designing and implementing these solar-driven fuel production processes to become viable in the next couple of decades.  The success of these nearer term solar reactor systems may provide valuable lessons for accelerating the longer-term development of carbon neutral solar fuel cycles based on high-temperature CO2/H2O redox cycles.

Presenting Author: Gregory Jackson Colorado School of Mines

Presenting Author Biography: Greg Jackson is a professor in Mechanical Engineering (ME) at the Colorado School of Mines where he leads a research team exploring issues related to concentrating solar power, large-scale energy storage, and high-temperature electrochemistry for power and hydrogen production. He came to Mines in 2013 and served as ME Dept. Head from 2013-2017. Before joining Mines, Jackson was a faculty member for over 15 years at the University of Maryland, where he also worked in the campus-wide Energy Research Center as Associate and Acting Director for several years. He has published broadly on materials and processes for combustion, high-temperature catalysis, electrochemistry, and solar energy capture for a range of energy conversion applications. Dr. Jackson received his PhD from Cornell University after which, he worked in the gas-turbine industry at Precision Combustion Inc. in Connecticut before becoming an academic.