THE WORLD’S first industrial plant using solar heat to make fuels has been opened in Germany. Using a vast array of mirrors that focus the sun’s heat onto a tower, the technology’s developer Synhelion plans to use its process to produce greener fuel for planes, ships and cars, and even low-carbon cement.
Is agriculture land based transport? Short of an actual nuclear tractor, nothing but diesel has the energy density sufficient to run modern scale farms.
Chatting around the fire we’ve tried to imagine a solution like dragging a cable but with tractors pushing close to 1000HP now that’s about a megawatt. That’s a long, fat cable or an extremely dangerous voltage to drag around a field, probably both. And an insane grid infrastructure to get power to the field borders.
You wouldn’t believe how much fuel goes into agriculture, to the point where I believe it makes up nearly a third of emissions (possibly including land clearing, can’t remember the details). Synthetic fuels are the only net-zero option.
Well I’m kind of a fan of the nuclear tractor honestly but I kind of doubt it :)