Airline Investment in Sustainable Aviation Fuel Taking off

By Timothy Eggert (FarmWeek Now) ... Backed with financial support and tax incentives at the federal and state levels, the push for boosting SAF production in the U.S. has accelerated since 2016, with stakeholders presenting it as a critical pathway to both decarbonize the aviation industry and maintain demand for American-grown grain.

Production of a mere 1.9 million gallons of SAF in 2016 increased to 15.8 million gallons in 2022. And led by a Biden administration-set goal of producing 35 billion gallons of SAF per year by 2050, the major U.S. airlines are leaning in hard to both consuming and developing the technology.

“SAF is for sure one of the largest pieces of our decarbonization elements,” Tom Michels, United Airlines’ director of government affairs, told FarmWeek.

“Ninety-eight percent of our corporate emissions comes from the combustion of jet fuel and the vast majority of that jet fuel is combusted on long-haul flights, and those are really not something that we could ever electrify,” Michels explained. “So, we need to find a liquid fuel that’s lower in carbon — and that’s sustainable aviation fuel.”

Among the top domestic providers of passenger flights, United has emerged as a leader in the SAF space.

American Airlines used 2.5 million gallons of SAF in 2022 and has committed to buying at least 620 million gallons of SAF between 2025 and 2030.

Delta Air Lines in 2022 announced it would purchase 525 million gallons of SAF over seven years, starting in 2026. It further aims to scale usage of the fuel in its fleet to 10% by 2030, 35% by 2035 and 95% by 2050.

Southwest Airlines in 2021 said it plans to buy 219 million gallons of SAF over a 15-year term, starting in 2026. Last year the fuel accounted for 0.1% of the airline’s total fuel consumption, and it plans by 2030 to have SAF account for 10% of its total fuel usage.

JetBlue Airways in 2021 unveiled a commitment to purchase 670 million gallons of SAF, from 2023 to 2033, for its flights using New York City airports.

The carbon intensity (CI) of those processes is at play, too, and for government incentives to align with SAF, the fuel must reach a 50% lifecycle GHG emissions reduction.

Because of that dynamic, industry stakeholders support the Biden administration using the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model to calculate the emissions from SAF production and award tax credits.

Under GREET, the first generation of SAF production — refining soybean oil or recycled cooking oils into the fuel — can easily reach the 50% reduction compared to traditional jet fuel “because you’re not picking up that much more carbon” during the conversion process, according to Paul Bertels, principal and senior agricultural consultant with Farmgate Insights.

But the second generation of SAF production, known as alcohol-to-jet, which uses corn grade ethanol as the feedstock, comes with less of a direct lifecycle emissions reduction due in part to GHG released from making nitrogen fertilizer used to grow corn for ethanol, Bertels explained.

And because of that difference, many SAF producers are looking to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as the “lowest-hanging fruit” to reduce their CI scores because “with that alone, depending on the plant, you can pretty much hit that 50% reduction” from converting ethanol to SAF, Bertels said.

That thinking is largely what’s leading development of a 120-million-gallon-per-year SAF production facility in Putnam County, near Hennepin, at the Marquis Industrial Complex.The SAF project, which is set to be operational by 2028, will use soybean oil produced by an on-site 220,000-bushel crush facility as the feedstock for SAF using LanzaJet’s Alcohol-to-Jet process. And it will incorporate on-site CCS to keep the fuel’s CI score 70% lower than conventional jet fuel.

Other than relying on just CCS to lower the CI-score of SAF made from ethanol, Bertels said some SAF producers are also looking to create “a closed loop system” wherein associated GHG emissions are lowered at every level of the process.

Those systems could include conservation tillage and cover crops at the cornfield level or using renewable energy generated from solar and wind to power an ethanol facility.

Many of those elements are set to be part of a 55-million-gallon per year ethanol-to-jet SAF facility, called Net-Zero 1, that Gevo is developing in South Dakota ahead of a 2026 deadline.

Data gathered from the system will ultimately be used to pay farmers a premium for their grain, calculated on the CI reductions their practices result in, Hartwig said. READ MORE

This story represents the second part of a three-part FarmWeek series exploring sustainable aviation fuel, titled "Farm, fuel, flight: How the aviation industry is betting on flyover country for decarbonization."