Abstract:
Decarbonising aviation, maritime transport, and heavy industry requires carbon-neutral liquid fuels producible at scale from renewable energy and atmospheric carbon dioxide without reliance on fossil resources. Although solar thermochemical redox cycles and direct air capture are individually promising for renewable fuel synthesis and atmospheric carbon removal, system-level performance consequences of different integration strategies within a shared production framework remain uncharacterised. This study evaluates four direct air capture integration strategies for a ceria-based solar redox methanol plant in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, using Aspen Plus and HFLCAL simulations with combined techno-economic and cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment and Monte Carlo uncertainty quantification at 400 MWth and 10 kt of methanol per year. The waste heat-driven solid sorbent configuration achieves the lowest levelised cost of fuel at 7.9 ± 0.4 USD2022/kg methanol, 17% below the non-integrated baseline, a global warming potential of −450 ± 30 g CO2e/kg methanol, and a solar-to-fuel efficiency of 6.1%. These results establish that thermal integration architecture is the primary determinant of system performance, that economic and environmental rankings diverge substantially across configurations, and that the framework is generalisable to solar thermochemical pathways including sustainable aviation fuel and Fischer-Tropsch liquids.
Manman Sun, Chunfeng Liu, Integrated direct air capture and solar redox cycles for carbon-neutral methanol production, Industrial Crops and Products, Volume 252, 2026, 124102, ISSN 0926-6690, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indcrop.2026.124102
