Will It Be the Summer of SAF, or of Circular Feedstocks, or Circular Chemicals?

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... If you look beyond the meetings and get down to the hard news flow, it’s still SAF, SAF, SAF, SAF and more SAF.

4AIR, which helps companies offset their emissions, use Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), and drive technological change, today announced the launch of Assure SAF Registry, a blockchain-based web registry designed to document, trace and account for the sustainability attributes of Sustainable Aviation Fuel. The registry is designed for both physical and book and claim supply chains of SAF and will simplify inventory accounting and prevent double-counting of benefits. All while protecting suppliers’ commercially sensitive and confidential data.

But there’s even harder news, if Grape Nuts are your preferred cereal and diamonds your favorite gem. Earlier today, The team of Praj and Indian Oil Corp.pout together the first commercial passenger flight for AirAsia using an indigenous SAF produced by Prajusing captive agricultural feedstock was successfully flown from Pune to New Delhi. Hon. Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri, received this special flight at the airport. The SAF sourced for this initiative by Praj Industries was made possible through a partnership with Gevo using Gevo’s Alcohol-to-Jet (ATJ) technology to produce SAF using bio-based feedstock. Praj Industries produced SAF samples at its state-of-the-art R&D facility, Praj Matrix, which underwent rigorous testing at IOCL laboratories before being blended for the special flight.

The Bottom Line: what’s hotter, SAF, feedstocks or chemicals?

SAF is the easy answer, but the correct answer in the bonus round is….it’s the summer of feedstocks. Even SAF is transitioning quickly beyond its plant oil / waste oil foundation. In the Praj/IOC announce, that’s sugarcane ethanol as the source of fuel, this is the alcohol-to-jet pathway. But, we think this is rapidly going to move past sugarcane and towards sugarcane bagasse, the potential for high-value fuel is there because of the low carbon intensity.

Which is to say this: the higher-values are in feedstock, the barriers to supply are in feedstock, the barriers to affordable price are in feedstock. It’s was ethanol ethanol ethanol until it was algae algae algae then it was cellulosic cellulosic cellulosic until it was chemicals chemicals chemicals. After it was vegan vegan vegan until is was diesel diesel diesel, it was SAF SAF SAF, but now we can see that it was the same thing all along. It is the summer of feedstock, and probably will be the decade of feedstock. The sustainable, affordable, reliable, available kind. You can call her Sara, and it is her time. READ MORE

Excerpt from Biobased Diesel Daily: 4AIR, which helps companies offset their emissions, use sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and drive technological change, announced May 22 the launch of its Assure SAF Registry, a blockchain-based web registry designed to document, trace and account for the sustainability attributes of SAF.

The Assure SAF Registry provides complete transparency about the type of SAF purchased, feedstock used, blend of the fuel and any sustainability certifications earned or regulatory programs for which the fuel may be eligible.

The registry is designed for both physical and book-and-claim supply chains of SAF and will simplify inventory accounting and prevent double-counting of benefits—all while protecting suppliers’ commercially sensitive and confidential data.

By uniquely addressing SAF tracking needs for fuel suppliers, FBOs, airlines and operators within the physical supply chain, the registry can unlock the opportunity for a robust book-and-claim tracking system as well.

“Most SAF today comes from one to two different feedstocks with a narrow range of blends,” said Kennedy Ricci, president of 4AIR. “As SAF expands to new feedstocks and higher blends, transparency about the fuel and where it came from will be critical in efforts to scale its use across the industry, including both business and commercial aviation. Assure SAF Registry will provide a key piece of infrastructure for the transparent scale-up of SAF in aviation, providing transparency to emission claims around SAF while maximizing the value for the operator.”

Leveraging the expertise gained through the documentation of 5.8 million gallons of SAF over the past two years, 4AIR created a registry that addresses the most challenging pain points found when tracing the usage of SAF.

Usually, SAF is comingled in airport pipelines or fuel farms under mass-balance or book-and-claim chains of custody, making it laborious to document, particularly when trying to retain information for regulatory claims from the use of the fuel.

The Assure SAF Registry serializes each unit of fuel and is linked to a specific owner and batch of SAF.

This ensures that only one owner can ever claim a specific quantity of fuel and that sustainability characteristics are consistently and accurately communicated through various owners, providing confidence in the ownership and emissions accounting up and down the SAF supply chain.

Pilot programs will help the platform to automate integrations with supplier systems, eliminating the need for much of the manual reporting and accounting.

In addition, a pilot program with the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials will seek recognition within the RSB book-and-claim system and work towards ecosystem harmonization and a credible claim for customers. READ MORE