From Take-Off to Offtake – Driving Sustainable Aviation Fuels to Commercial Scale

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January 23, 2019

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In a tale of two Washingtons, the sustainable aviation fuels movement will gather in Washington state in March and in Washington, D.C. in April to seek breakthroughs in the adoption rate of jet biofuels, which have been stalled for some time between the successful certification/demonstration efforts of the last decade and the widespread deployment which is the focus of all the effort.

The world is demonstrably interested in $2.00 fuels and demonstrably capable of mitigating aviation’s contributions to climate change at something around $5.00 per gallon. To put this in the context of flights and dollars, a jet burns roughly 31 gallons of fuel per passenger, flying from Seattle to Washington, D.C., or around $80 or so per passenger. So, switching to a $5.00 biofuel in a 10 percent blend (as a starting point in a journey towards sustainable fuels) would cost a passenger a premium of approximately $9. There’s plenty of evidence in totting up the sale of sandwiches, drinks, onboard wireless, premium economy seats, upgrades, lounge access and so forth that there’s substantial support for $10 price add-ons in aviation, these days. The lack of a direct benefit appears to be at issue.

One of these days, governments might impose a tax for carbon capture and storage, and then simply allow airlines to minimize that tax via utilizing low carbon fuels. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that taxes should be paid to clean up and store the residues of industrial or personal activity — after all, we pay to have garbage picked up and stored at the landfill. Think of it as a carbon storage charge — we pay data storage, why not carbon storage accounts?

And, that would set up a healthy competition between the purveyors of carbon storage and low-carbon fuels to rescue the costs that society pays to enjoy energy use, consequence-free. When carbon storage is costly and biofuels are cheap, we switch to more alternative low-carbon fuels. When low-carb fuels become costly and storage is cheap, why not store more?

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And we certainly could use some bipartisan spirit to establish a meaningful and enduring cost of carbon — but why not calculate the cost of carbon by comparing capture/storage to the cost of low-carb alternatives? In our current system we usually mandate some level of low-carbon fuels, and have a cap-and-trade system that gets invariably more expensive as the intensity of carbon reduction increases — because we are comparing to a petroleum baseline instead of a carbon storage baseline.

All that? Discussion for a future date — for now, we have the low-carbon legislation we have, (California, Oregon and British Columbia), plus the various mandates around the world that, none of them, directly address jet fuels at this time. And the discussion thereby becomes one of R&D, site selection, infrastructure, policy, offtake, financing — ultimately, feasibility.

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In Colorado, Gevo and Renmatix announced a joint development agreement to evaluate the commercial feasibility of creating renewable jet fuel by integrating Renmatix’s Plantrose® Process with Gevo’s GIFTTM technology and alcohol to jet process. Renmatix’s Plantrose Process converts cellulosic feedstocks such as wood, agricultural residues, or other cellulosic raw materials to cellulosic-based sugars, the basic building blocks of sustainable fuels. Together, Renmatix and Gevo will explore project opportunities for renewable and low-emission fuel, isobutanol, jet fuel and isooctane in markets where there is a convergence of low-cost biomass and low-carbon fuel incentives.

In India, on December 17, Experimental Test Pilots and Test Engineer from IAF’s premier testing establishment ASTE, flew India’s first military flight using blended bio-jet fuel on the An-32 transport aircraft. The project is a combined effort of IAF, DRDO, Directorate General Aeronautical Quality Assurance (DGAQA) and CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum.

In Japan, Euglena has completed its new biofuel refinery plant and launched the production of algae and waste oil based biojet fuel and biodiesel in order to achieve their goal of being the first company to provide biofuel for commercial flights in Japan by 2020.

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In California, Greencar Congress reports that researchers from JBEI along with Chinese colleagues have produced three promising aviation jet fuel feedstocks whose results were recently published in open-access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels. Researchers undertook computational analysis looking at three sesquiterpenes—epi-isozizaene, pentalenene and α-isocomene—and found they were comparable to commercial fossil-based jet fuel. They were then produced using bioengineering to demonstrate possible viable pathways for producing the feedstocks that are highly energy dense and have low freezing points.

In Australia, Virgin Australia announced it has achieved an Australian first, with the successful completion of a trial to deliver sustainable aviation fuel through Brisbane Airport’s general fuel supply system. Working in partnership with the Queensland Government, Brisbane Airport Corporation, US-based biofuel producer Gevo, Inc. and supply chain partners Caltex and DB Schenker, Virgin Australia led the procurement and blending of sustainable aviation fuel, or biojet, with traditional jet fuel for supply into the fuel infrastructure at Brisbane Airport.

In Indonesia, Reuters reports that the country is playing hardball with the US and France, demanding that its companies be able to set up aviation biofuel production plants using palm oil as feedstock in those countries in exchange for buying Boeing and Airbus planes, respectively.

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In Canada, the Minister of Natural Resources issued a nationwide challenge to Canadians to develop the cleanest, most affordable and sustainable aviation fuel for the aviation sector to further reduce its carbon footprint and fight climate change. The Sky’s the Limit Challenge stimulates the development of sustainable aviation fuel supply chains so that the Canadian aviation industry can further reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and lower the flying public’s environmental footprint.

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New Energy Risk’s new performance insurance for TCG Global’s gasifiers and a significant project advance from Velocys in the UK are on the docket. READ MORE

Carbon Tax for Non-Renewable Fuels (Advanced Biofuels USA)

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