We'd still need tens of thousands of these plants. From [0] it's mentioned that
> According to Andreas Sizmann, SOLAR-JET project coordinator at BHL, a solar reactor with a 1 km2 solar field could generate 20,000 L/d of kerosene, which could fly a large 300-body commercial airliner for about seven hours.
According to [1] there are about 10000 planes in the air at any moment (excluding private jets, military, and cargo planes):
> Back in 2017, FlightAware determined there to be an average of 9,728 commercial airplanes in the sky at any given time. Of course, that number fluctuates on a minute-by-minute basis, given that planes are nearly constantly taking off and landing.
Doing the math of 10000 × (24 ÷ 7) gives us 35285 of these one square kilometer plants, or about 12% of the area of the entire state of Nevada.
So it might be actually doable from a back of the envelope math analysis, but it'd be quite a big endeavor to scale a facility that large.
[0] https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/first-kerosene-made...
[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...
> According to Andreas Sizmann, SOLAR-JET project coordinator at BHL, a solar reactor with a 1 km2 solar field could generate 20,000 L/d of kerosene, which could fly a large 300-body commercial airliner for about seven hours.
According to [1] there are about 10000 planes in the air at any moment (excluding private jets, military, and cargo planes):
> Back in 2017, FlightAware determined there to be an average of 9,728 commercial airplanes in the sky at any given time. Of course, that number fluctuates on a minute-by-minute basis, given that planes are nearly constantly taking off and landing.
Doing the math of 10000 × (24 ÷ 7) gives us 35285 of these one square kilometer plants, or about 12% of the area of the entire state of Nevada.
So it might be actually doable from a back of the envelope math analysis, but it'd be quite a big endeavor to scale a facility that large.
[0] https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/first-kerosene-made...
[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...