Victor Tango Foxtrot – The Pursuit of Affordable Sustainable Aviation Fuels at Scale
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In aviation fuels as elsewhere in life, it’s sustainable, affordable, available, pick two out of three. You can find affordable SAF, but not in big volumes. You can find as much unaffordable SAF as you like. as we know, there’s plenty of petroleum-based jet fuel and the carbon numbers are astronomical (a case of “off we go into the wild black yonder”).
The world is asking for all three at one time, which is why news out of the Farnborough Air Show — that Boeing and Alder Fuels established a partnership to expand production of sustainable aviation fuel around the world — is a big deal.
The Boeing, Alder gambit
It starts with steps that were familiar from the qualification of what are known as HEFA fuels some 13 years ago (those are the jet fuels made from plant oils and fryer oil, and so forth).
Using Boeing airplanes, the companies will test and qualify Alder-derived SAF, advance policies to expedite the transition to renewable energy in aviation, and grow the amount of SAF for the global aerospace market. The 2008-2011 era was replete with these kinds of tests — they are essential to the bringing forward of a new fuel.
That’s why this effort is important to understand. Alder is attempting to solve the supply-chain problem that HEFA brings with it — an excellent and proven fuel that is used every day around the world now, the HEFA for of sustainable aviation fuel is made from plant oils and waste oils. Not that we’re going to run out of plant oils, any more than the Stone Age ended because we ran out of stones.
What we are running out of is affordable plant oils.
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Alder is moving around this limitation with a newer technology originally developed by a group led out of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory. You can read at incredible and mystifying length about it here. Short version? It works a little like anaerobic digestion, except the AD process is stopped down when partially complete, leaving us with volatile fatty acids that can be upgraded to jet fuel. It’s Volatile Fatty Acids t]To Fuels , or victor tango foxtrot if you like.
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First, on the technical side, AD is a proven technology and there are more than 10,000 sites around the world producing methane from waste using methanogens. Second, waste is cheap — and in AD we are not limited to dairy and cattle waste, even though many projects focus on that Nirvana of feedstocks. We can use crop and forest waste, for example, as long as it is wet enough.
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(Brian) Sherbacow is known as a do-er. Alder expects completion of its first plant in 2024, and expectations are high that they will achieve that.
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Boeing will support testing and qualification of Alder-derived SAF including flight demonstrations to ensure readiness.
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In January 2021, Boeing committed to deliver 100% SAF-capable airplanes by 2030 and is also using SAF in its own operations while working across the globe to scale up the supply of SAF.
Boeing has been a pioneer in making SAF a reality.
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Here in Digestville, we have heard much of the solids-to-liquids conversion problem, and given the urgency of the requirements, looking toward GTL (gas-to-liquid) technologies makes a lot of sense. Fisher-Tropsch technology has been around for a long time as a pathway to convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen to fuels — capex is an issue, gasifying biomass into a usable stream of biogas is another issue. We hope to see that solved, commercially at scale, with the advent of the Velocys project in the northern UK.
Another pathway is converting methane to methanol. But here is a pathway for getting from what we have in cheap abundance, to what we need (SAF) that is neither affordable nor widely available. What we like is the abundance of anaerobic digestion expertise and feedstock. Bottom line, if Alder is successful, is is not just about the success of a company and a technology but the arrival of a whole new pathway that could well be the solution to our SAF woes. READ MORE
Excerpt from Alder Fuels: Alder Fuels’ proprietary technology enables the efficient conversion of abundant, sustainable forest residues and regenerative biomass into a low-negative carbon “greencrude” for jet fuel conversion. The Alder product is suitable for conversion into drop-in SAF, meaning it can be produced by existing refineries with their current equipment and infrastructure. Alder expects completion of its first plant in 2024.
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“Alder’s technology offers a future of gathering energy to power aircraft, instead of drilling for it, by converting widely available sustainable biomass into a sustainable product for refining into SAF,” said Alder Fuels CEO Bryan Sherbacow. “We can now scale up supply to meet the aviation industry’s demand. This partnership with Boeing will expedite SAF availability around the globe, advance policies that ensure sustainability and foster environmental justice, and cultivate local economies.” READ MORE
