Ethanol’s Own SAF Runway
by Luke Geiver (Ethanol Producer Magazine) The world’s major airlines are racing to decarbonize air travel by backing and using sustainable aviation fuel. Much of it is now being produced via plant-based oils in tandem with renewable diesel. Soon, it may also come from ethanol. — … Speaking to the crowd at the National Ethanol Conference earlier this year, William Collings, mechanical engineer and consultant for 1898 & Co., said the use of triglycerides for SAF is slowing down because there is not a lot of it out there. “Maybe the next triglyceride isn’t a triglyceride at all,” he said. “Maybe it is ethanol.”
The U.S. Department of Energy has created the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge, to deal with the cost, sustainability and production of SAF. D3MAX, a fiber-to-ethanol production company with an operational system running at Ace Ethanol LLC in Stanley, Wisconsin, offers a glimpse into the merit in Collings’ assessment of ethanol as an SAF feedstock.
Earlier this year, Mark Yancy, chief technology officer at D3MAX, helped create a spin-off entity to focus on the SAF opportunity. SAFFiRE (Sustainable Aviation Fuel from Renewable Ethanol), will demonstrate reliable, low-greenhouse gas (GHG) production of SAF from corn stover in a fully integrated, 10-metric ton per day pilot-scale facility. Yancy and the SAFFiRE team will utilize funding from DOE’s SAF Grand Challenge. The company aims to commercialize a novel process first created and tested at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. NREL has already proven how well the low-temperature deacetylation and mechanical refining pretreatment process can work when combined with enzymatic hydrolysis and C5/C6 sugar fermentation—the platform SAFFiRE will use to make the cellulosic ethanol building block of bio-jet fuel.
DOE selected SAFFiRE to prove its technology at pilot scale before ramping it up to produce commercial volumes of ethanol intermediate product. Along with other partners, Yancy’s team will be working with another SAF staple, LanzaJet.
…
NREL has already calculated that SAF produced using the SAFFiRE approach will record an 85 percent reduction in carbon intensity score. One of the mainstays of the process relies on the pH of the corn stover biomass. While other processes have utilized dilute acid pretreatment with low pH balances, (most of which have failed to date), SAFFiRE will raise the pH in a pretreatment process of the biomass. Most corn-stover-to-ethanol plants have failed, Yancy explained, because the pretreatment requirements for the process often caused system failures in equipment not capable, within financial reason, to handle the high-pressures needed early in the process. SAFFiRE’s approach can utilize stainless steel equipment that is off-the-shelf and obtainable quickly. “This project will have low technology risk,” Yancy says. “Data from this will help create the first commercial plant.”
Gevo, a long-running, successful advanced biofuel, biochemicals and bioplastics producer, is also in the mix with top SAF pursuers. In February, Gevo signed a five-year, 200 MMgy deal with the Oneworld Alliance, a network of world-class airlines, for Gevo’s version of SAF.
…
Understanding the true opportunity for sustainable aviation fuel derived from ethanol or other renewable sources starts with CAAFI, the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative.
…
Yancy says rough calculations show jet fuel currently costs in a range between $2.50 to $3.50 per gallon. SAF however, ranges in price from $6 to $8 per gallon. “The aviation industry not only needs billions of gallons of SAF,” Yancy says. “They need it at a lower price.” READ MORE
