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Sustainable aviation fuel could become viable ethanol market
Sustainable aviation fuel could soon become a viable market for ethanol producers.
Leigh Abrams with global fuel supplier Honeywell took part in a panel at the National Ethanol Conference in Orlando Wednesday and said there’s been a shift in the renewable fuels space the past two years.
“This is really a big change from the focus on renewable diesel, particularly in the United States. And a lot of that is because there aren’t a lot of solutions for decarbonizing aviation.”
She says governments worldwide are developing policies to spur development of sustainable aviation fuel, including recent targets set by the U.S. Department of Energy.
“They’re looking to incentivize the production of 3 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel by 2030, and that’s going to grow to 35 billion by 2050.”
Abrams says to speed up the sustainable aviation fuel transition, technologies need to be developed at scale using ethanol.
Actually there already is technology, whereby CO2 can be captured from ethanol refineries and manipulated with H2 to form Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), which can then become a second liquid fuel for the American ethanol industry to sell along with their ethanol.
FYI ETHANOL INDUSTRY: Several technologies currently exist to produce SAF. One of these technologies is the synthetic route. As a feedstock, this “E-FUEL” uses captured CO2 from unavoidable industrial processes or the air directly. The CO2 is then converted to SAF through a chemical process in combination with “Green Hydrogen” which is splitting H2O by solar/wind energy.
or;
“Turquoise Hydrogen”, which is my term for H2 created by “Methane Pyrolysis”. “Methane Pyrolysis” is the process whereby the H2 in CH4 (natural gas) is separated from the lone Carbon atom in a non-oxygen chamber, which changes the Carbon’s state of matter from a gas to a solid, or “carbon black”.