9 Constellations to Watch: A Look at the Rising Stars in the Race to SAF

by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) ... (T)oday we explore 9 of those constellations building around Sustainable Aviation Fuels. Some of them are young protostars in the earliest stage of stellar evolution, while others are like the Earth’s sun, a main-sequence mid-size star, and a few are superstars like, well, a supernova of course.

There’s also a slew of interesting feedstocks – Velocys’ and Fulcrum’s municipal solid waste, Gevo and Praj’s rice straw, LanzaTech’s carbon, Neste’s plant oils and waste oils, RedRock’s forestry waste, and more. The feedstocks are there. The technologies are there. The partnerships are there. The magic is there.

Velocys, Shell, British Airways. Biofuels is often working in a world of firsts and this constellation is no different. British Airways, Shell and Velocys is building the Europe’s first waste-to-energy facility, taking trash and converting it to wonderful, glorious biojet fuel. Just a week ago came news that things are moving along with the application for planning permission to build the aviation biofuel production facility being submitted for approval in the UK, with half a million metric tons of MSW expected to be used as feedstock annually at the proposed site. Last month, Velocys announced that British Airways and Shell invested nearly nearly £3 million ($3.6 million) in the company so it’s no surprise that things are moving forward with this commercial scale project for a waste-to-jet plant. Region: EU

Gevo, Virgin, LanzaJet. In June, Virgin Australia Airlines racked up 1 million kilometers on aviation biofuel with 700 flights flown on a blend since it started running its trial on commercial flights last fall. The trial is in partnership between the airline, Gevo, the government of Queensland, Brisbane Airport where Virgin Australia has its hub, and supply chain partners Caltex and DB Schenker. Just a few weeks ago, Gevo announced that it entered into a partnership agreement with Air TOTAL to produce and supply sustainable aviation fuel (“SAF”) for use and distribution in France and other parts of Europe. Gevo also signed a licensing agreement with India-based Praj earlier this summer for biobutanol biocatalyst technology and Gevo CEO Patrick Gruber noted that “we believe this second-generation technology combination has great potential to address India’s rice straw burning problem and related air pollution, while generating low-carbon hydrocarbons for jet fuel and gasoline.”

As for LanzaTech, Virgin Atlantic started working with them back in 2011, produced their first 1,500 gallons of biofuel in 2016, which seems eons ago, and had their first biofuel flight from Orlando to London Gatwick with LanzaTech biofuel in September 2018. The UK’s largest bank, HSBC has been involved, as has Boeing and other technical partners. LanzaTech is expanding the constellation a bit now with news earlier this summer of their offtake agreement for SAF with All Nippon Airways in Japan. Region: EU, US, India.

Fulcrum, Waste Management, United Airlines, Cathay, Air BP. Fulcrum is certainly getting a lot of attention with their $1 billion valuation in their latest capital raise, and all that from a 10 million-gallon first commercial facility in Nevada that’s not completed yet. It’s definitely a class operation in terms of assembling and managing partners and being focused on developing solutions. They are more of a technology integrator than a developer and have swapped several technologies in and out. The carbon cores from using municipal solid waste are awesome, it’s been more of an issue of learning to handle to feedstock and homogenize it, and getting a technology set that can work with MSW day in and day out at rapid rates of production and high levels of uptime. Regions: US for now.

SkyNRG, KLM, SHV Energy. Shell Aviation, Sodra. SkyNRG is building a plant in Rotterdam with KLM and SHV as partners, scheduled to be online in the next three years. Sodra is a forestry company of note in Scandinavia that is closely allied in this constellation. Region: EU.

JetBlue, SG Preston, Airbus. About three years ago, JetBlue and biofuels producer SG Preston signed a 10-year biofuel purchase agreement for 33 million gallons per year of SAF and just last year, JetBlue received several Airbus planes running on a 15.5% biofuel blend. SG Preston must be getting ready to grow some more as it is the first company to announce its interest in potentially buying the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, which was damaged in a fire in June. S.G. Preston would convert the refinery and 1,300 acres to produce renewable diesel, marine diesel, and jet fuel, mostly from waste fats and oils as the feedstock. Region: US

Neste, Air BP, Alaska et al. We’d have to consider Neste as the far-and-away leader to date. Significant partners, they supply a lot of the fuel that’s going around.

Velocys, British Airways. Velocys has been integral as a technology supplier to RedRock and they’ve reached commercial scale at ENVIA.

World Energy, Honeywell, Word Fuel Services, US Navy et al. Next to Neste, we’d consider these the market leaders and, like Neste, this constellation is focused on plant oils and waste fats oils and greases.

RedRock, FedEx, Southwest Airlines. This Oregon first commercial is expected in the business model to have more plants on a Build Own Operate basis. Right now, our understanding is that there’s a technology problem that the U.S. Department of Energy is aiming to help fix.

Other Constellations to Watch Closely

There are quite a number of groups more at the early-stage R&D — Vertimass, SBI, Corbus, Mercurius, Euglena, etc. that could be a Digest topic another day. But there are three groups that are more seriously assembling themselves and what is so attractive is not so much the technologies themselves but the regional groupings.

REG, Phillips 66, Port of Seattle, and a 13-airline group out of SEA. It’s primarily renewable diesel in focus because of the economics of low carbon credits in California, but the Port has striking ambitions and REG has a project with Phillips in development in Washington state (250 million gallons) and they also are expanding capacity at the 73 million-gallon Geismar (Louisiana) facility. Region: US.

Agrisoma, ARA, University of Florida. ARA is a technology that’s going through an extended certification period because it enables 100% replacement of fuel, instead of 50/50 or lesser blends, so this one has taken longer but keep a sharp eye on it, and the SPARC consortium out of Florida which includes Agrisoma as a carinata feedstock partner. Region: US.

Byogy, Virgin Australia, Mercurius, Northern Oil. Queensland has shown a remarkable commitment to developing sustainable aviation fuels via a hub strategy and has been attracting earlier-stage partners and technologies of great interest. READ MORE