[TheAntiDoomer]

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24712/?a=f

Sundrop Fuels, a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims.

[Revi]

This is a great idea. Use the sun to take biomass and turn it into liquid fuel.

The problem remains that you can only get so much biomass per year off of an acre of land.

[hillsidedigger]

This is a great idea. Use the sun to take biomass and turn it into liquid fuel.

The problem remains that you can only get so much biomass per year off of an acre of land.

It also takes a great deal of energy to harvest and transport biomass in bulk.

[Revi]

John Deere has a new kind of biomass harvester. It is essentially a gigantic baler that takes wood waste and makes it into something that can dry out and be shredded later:

[Gerben]

It's a good idea to use sunlight for gasification, but it seems like a bad choice to produce gasoline with it. Solar is hard to scale up, while FT processes are complex and therefore require a large scale. It would be a lot easier (and more realistic) to use this process to synthesize an easier to produce chemical feedstock (such as hydrogen, or methanol) in a small-scale facility.

[steam_cannon]

It's a good idea. Gasification technologies have the potential to be useful in the future and merging them with high temperature solar is a smart adaptation. Also I like the name Solar Reactors. As it happens, this also works with actual nuclear reactors using nuclear gasification(1978). And I think the heat source could be electric from wind. So I think this is a technology with some potential and it will be interesting seeing how this technology develops.