Air2Fuel: Renewable solar fuel production by direct air capture

Purpose and goal:

This planning project will prepare a proposal called Air2Fuel for the 2024 EIC Pathfinder Challenge for Solar-to-X devices for development of next generation of solar devices for production of renewable fuels and chemicals from CO2 using sunlight. The Air2Fuel project is to develop a lab-scale solar device to produce methanol using sunlight, CO2 and water.

Air2Fuel is a unique innovation activity for non-biological synthetic fuel production as it is designed specifically to directly utilize CO2 from atmosphere. Expected results and effects:

The Air2Fuel project has identified future market need where global production capacity of pure CO2 is insufficient to meet the expected demands for synthetic fuel production to replace fossil fuel. The production of pure CO2 feedstock from direct air capture is also financially costly. The expected project outcome will completely sidestep the limitation of insufficient pure CO2 feedstock production capacity.

In addition, direct utilisation of CO2 from atmosphere will allow significant cost savings without the need of external direct air capture devices to produce pure CO2. Approach and implementation: The planning project will have three phases. The first phase is to refine the technical scope of the project.

The second phase of the project is to identify and refine the impact of the project in relation to the expectation of the EIC pathfinder challenge. The final phase will be proposal preparation and submission to the EIC pathfinder call. All three phases of the planning project will be carried by the Air2Fuel consortium and directed by the project coordinator. Project coordinator will ensure that the proposal is of high quality and submitted to the EIC.