In principle, solar fuels are identical with conventional fuels. However, they contain fewer impurities, which means they emit less noxious gases when burned. A win-win situation for the environment!

We can produce any type of solar fuel: kerosene, gasoline, diesel, methanol, hydrogen, synthetic crude oil, and many more. This is possible because we produce hydrocarbon chains – and simply put, fuels are nothing else but hydrocarbon chains of different lengths.

No, solar fuels are a drop-in technology, which means that they can replace fossil fuels without any need to change the existing global fuel infrastructure. They are compatible with existing internal combustion engines and jet engines.

We target a production cost below EUR 1 per liter within the next ten years. Our goal is to reach production costs competitive with other sustainable fuel technologies.

Yes, that would be possible. However, we are focusing on the transportation sector because it will continue to rely on energy-dense liquid fuels due to demanding requirements for mobile energy storage.

Yes, it is. When conventional fuels are burnt with oxygen, they release heat, CO₂, and water vapor. Synhelion’s technology reverses this process. With the help of solar heat, we recombine water vapor and CO₂ into hydrocarbon fuels.

The transportation industry accounts for approximately 25 percent – or 8 billion tons – of manmade CO₂ emissions per year. CO₂ is the principal greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. Replacing fossil fuels with solar fuels is therefore one of the much-needed solutions to fight climate change. However, Synhelion believes that to combat climate change and its related problems, it is important that many different, new technologies and innovations come together.

Yes, because solar fuels are produced from abundant resources and the solar fields are installed on non-arable land. An independent study assessing the geographical potential concludes that solar fuels could cover 50 times the current global jet fuel demand.

Ideal conditions can be found in desert and high insolation areas around the world. For efficient production, we need a direct normal irradiation (DNI) above 1’800 kWh/m². Check out the Global Solar Atlas to find out where solar fuel plants could be located.

We successfully built our first industrial solar fuel plant in Jülich, Germany. It is called plant DAWN. Industrial solar fuel production will start at plant DAWN in 2024, and from 2025, we plan to build the first commercial production facility in Spain. By 2033, we plan to ramp up production capacity to produce 1 million tons of solar fuel per year. By 2040, we aim to ramp up fuel production to cover half of European SAF demand.

Synhelion’s mission is to support the defossilization of the transportation sector, especially those sectors that are difficult to electrify, such as aviation and shipping.

In road transportation, electrification plays a key role in reducing CO₂ emissions. While electromobility can be rolled out quickly in some regions of the world, such as Europe, it will take much longer in other regions to significantly reduce the number of vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE). Studies show that there will be many remaining ICE vehicles around the world that will also need to be powered sustainably to meet net-zero emission targets by 2050. As a complementary solution to road electrification, Synhelion’s solar fuels can help achieve these targets.

Thermochemical production of solar fuels requires extremely high process temperatures. We solved key challenges in the transformation of solar radiation into process heat and in thermal energy storage. Furthermore, we developed a unique technology to produce syngas. By combining these innovation fronts, we can achieve unprecedented efficiency.