The company has signed a long-term solar gasoline purchase agreement with AMAG Group, which will purchase 50,000 liters of solar gasoline per year from Synhelion’s RISE plant in Spain from 2027.
Synhelion, a Swiss company that claims to be a global pioneer in sustainable solar fuels, has developed a technology to produce the next generation of synthetic fuels from solar energy.
Carmen Murer, spokesperson for Synhelion, explained the process pv magazine: “We use solar heat directly, without having to convert it into electricity. A field of heliostats (mirrors) concentrates the solar radiation on our receiver, which is located on a solar tower. The solar receiver delivers unprecedented process heat of more than 1,500 C. The heat generated is fed to our thermochemical reactor, which controls the thermochemical processes for the production of syngas, a mixture of H2 and CO.”
“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 fuels are nothing more than hydrocarbon chains of different lengths,” the company adds.
In June 2024, Synhelion opened the DAWN plant in Jülich, Germany, which it claims is the world’s first industrial plant for the production of synthetic fuels from solar energy. The company says its solar fuel production technology is ready for large-scale production.
Image: Synhelion
DAWN has a 20 meter high solar tower and a mirror field. The solar tower contains a solar receiver, a thermochemical reactor and a thermal energy accumulator that can produce solar fuel 24 hours a day. The construction of DAWN was made possible thanks to Synhelion investors and funding from the Energy Research Program of the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action.
In 2025, Synhelion will start building its first commercial factory in Spain, called RISE. It will have a production capacity of 1,000 tons of solar fuel per year, including renewable kerosene, diesel and gasoline. Solar fuel production is expected to begin in 2027. The RISE plant will produce solar kerosene for aircraft, diesel for ships and trucks and gasoline for cars.
Swiss car company AMAG Group signed a long-term purchase agreement for solar gasoline with Synhelion on Monday. From 2027, AMAG Group will purchase 50,000 liters of solar fuel per year, produced at the RISE factory in Spain, to reduce CO2 emissions from its current fleet.
Synhelion explains that its solar fuels are a ‘drop-in’ technology, meaning they can replace fossil fuels without the need to adapt existing global fuel infrastructure and are compatible with existing combustion engines and jet engines. As for price, the company states that “our goal is for production costs to be less than €1 per liter over the next ten years.”
In 2023, Synhelion and Cemex launched the world’s first solar-powered cement plant, which has been producing on an industrial scale since 2023. The pilot project was installed at IMDEA Energía’s Very High Concentration Solar Tower, located in Móstoles.
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