Ways to make aviation fuel green | The Economist 27/08/2022, 20:27

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Ways to make aviation

fuel green
Airlines hope to become carbon neutral by 2050

Aug 17th 2022 Save Share Give

T ravelling by air is by no means the biggest source

of anthropogenic greenhouse-gases. At the moment,
it contributes about 2.5% of them. But, after a covid-
induced dip, air travel is once again growing (see chart),
and its emissions are high-pro!le and hard to deal with.
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Ways to make aviation fuel green | The Economist 27/08/2022, 20:27

and its emissions are high-pro!le and hard to deal with.

For short-range, small-capacity planes batteries show
some immediate promise. But for bigger aircraft the
technofantasy of using compressed hydrogen (made
from green sources, natch) either as jet fuel in its own
right, or to run fuel cells which then drive electric
motors, is likely to remain just that—a fantasy—for
decades.

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Hence the
popularity of
the idea of
sustainable
aviation fuel
(saf). This
magical
substance
would match
existing fuel
in all relevant
parameters
and would
thus, in the
argot, be a “drop-in” replacement for the kerosene
currently burned by planes. But instead of being distilled
from crude oil, saf would be manufactured either
directly or indirectly from carbon dioxide.

Ideally, this CO2 will have come recently from the

atmosphere, so that when it returns to the air no net
greenhouse e"ect is created. At minimum, though, it will
be extracted from the exhaust of an industrial process,
enabling it at least to substitute for fossil-fuel emissions
elsewhere before it is released.

Do this at a price competitive with stu" from a re!nery

and the world is your oyster. Airlines have already
undertaken some 450,000 #ights using saf as part of the
fuel mix. The industry aims to be carbon neutral by 2050,
and so far saf seems the only practical way to get there.
But making saf is an uphill task. Stripped to its chemical
essentials it means taking the equivalent of engine
exhaust and turning it into something resembling what
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Ways to make aviation fuel green | The Economist 27/08/2022, 20:27

exhaust and turning it into something resembling what

went into that engine in the !rst place. This requires

“!xing” the carbon of carbon dioxide into big energy-rich
molecules. Not surprisingly, the result is around three
times as costly as ordinary jet fuel.

Such saf as has so far made it to market relies on

photosynthesis to do the carbon !xing. It is derived from
discarded cooking oil and animal fats, the triglyceride
molecules of which trace their existence to the action of
sunlight on chlorophyll.
To make saf, triglycerides are hydrotreated, an
established way of producing biodiesel for ground
transport. A triglyceride molecule consist of three
hydrocarbon tails attached to an oxygen-containing
head. Hydrotreating combines the oxygen with
hydrogen, to yield water. This liberates the tails and turns
the head into a molecule of propane. The liberated tails
can then be processed into drop-ins.

Boarding now
At the moment, the biggest producer of hydrotreated saf
is Neste, a Finnish !rm. It is expanding a biodiesel plant
in Rotterdam for saf production and also enlarging a
purpose-built one at Porvoo, in its home country. Neste
aims, by the end of 2023, to be turning out 1.9bn litres of
saf per year—some 15 times total world production in
2021 (though still less than 2% of global jet-fuel
consumption). A milestone of sorts was reached in July
when American Airlines took delivery of the !rst batch of
saf to be veri!ed as green by corsia, the Carbon
O"setting and Reduction Scheme for International
Aviation, which benchmarks aviation-emission
standards.

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Ways to make aviation fuel green | The Economist 27/08/2022, 20:27

Neste, though, is not the only company using

hydrotreating to make saf from recycled cooking oils
and fats. In America a !rm called World Energy employs
a former oil re!nery in Paramount, California, to do
something similar. Paramount was, indeed, the !rst
plant to make saf commercially, having been converted
to do so in 2016 by Bryan Sherbacow, a green
entrepreneur. World Energy, to which Mr Sherbacow sold
the plant in 2018, has teamed up with Air Products, a
specialist in industrial gases, and Honeywell, an
engineering !rm, to expand the operation. By 2025, it
expects to make around 1.3bn litres of saf a year. Mr
Sherbacow himself, meanwhile, has set o" in a di"erent
direction. This is to widen the range of waste materials
that can be turned into saf.

A big obstacle to expanding the triglyceride approach to

saf is the supply of raw materials. Adding value to
catering waste is something all can applaud. But for it to
make a serious contribution to the jet-fuel market would
mean buying fresh oils and fats that might otherwise be
used as food. This would raise prices and encourage the
spread of oil-palm plantations, both of which will bring
problems of their own.

Mr Sherbacow’s new project, Alder Fuels, is on the case.

Alder’s raw material is also waste—but in this case,
leftovers from forestry and agriculture. Such “biomass”
consists mainly of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin—
three structural polymers that act, in essence, as a plant’s
skeleton.

Structural polymers cannot be processed by anything

resembling hydrotreating. Instead, Alder uses pyrolysis,
which breaks the material concerned into smaller
molecules by applying heat. The result is condensed into
a hydrocarbon-rich liquid that the !rm calls greencrude.
This can be processed into saf in existing re!neries and
Boeing, America’s biggest aircraft maker, announced in
July that it would use some of its planes to test and
qualify the result. Alder hopes to begin commercial
production in 2024.

Waste not, want not

One problem with using biomass as raw material is that
it is bulky, and thus expensive to gather, transport and

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store. To get around this, Alder is looking at a “hub-and-

spoke” system, in which the processing plants are at the
ends of the spokes, near sources of biomass, and the
resulting greencrude is transported in tankers to a
re!nery at the hub.
According to Alder’s calculations, forestry and
agricultural waste are, if processed this way, abundant
enough in America to supply three-quarters of the
country’s current demand for aviation fuel, with no need
to establish new plantations, or to compete with food
production. Even so, others propose yet a di"erent
strategy. This is to !x carbon dioxide directly in an
industrial plant, rather than relying on biology to do the
job.

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The most popular approaches to such direct !xation are

called power-to-liquid processes. These yield what are
known as e-fuels (an abbreviation of electrofuels, as
production relies, at least in part, on electricity). Power-
to-liquid processes vary. But all have in common the
creation of a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide,
known as syngas.

The value of syngas is that, at appropriate temperatures

and pressures, and in the presence of suitable catalysts,
its constituents react to yield hydrocarbons and water.
This is called the Fischer–Tropsch process, after the
German chemists who invented it in the 1920s, and it was
used by Germany during the second world war to convert
coal into liquid fuels, to make up for the country’s lack of
access to petroleum.

That wartime approach involved the partial oxidation of

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the coal to create carbon monoxide. But this ingredient

can also be made by the partial reduction of CO2—hence
the interest in its use for saf. The CO2 in question could
come from many sources. Some dream of plucking it
directly from the atmosphere, using what is known as
direct air capture (dac) to !lter it out. Others, more
pragmatically, suggest extracting it as a by-product from
methane-generating biodigesters, or from fermentation
plants, such as breweries.
If renewable electricity is then used to make the
hydrogen, by electrolysing water, the resulting e-fuel is
pretty green. One country with abundant hydro and wind
power which can be taken advantage of in this way is
Norway. And it is here that a consortium called Norsk e-
Fuel is building a dac plant to produce saf. Production
of 12.5m litres a year should start in 2024.

Another source of renewable power is the sun.

Synhelion, a Swiss !rm, employs a !eld of mirrors to
re#ect sunlight to a receiver at the top of a tower. This
heats a transfer #uid in the receiver to a temperature in
excess of 1,500°C and that #uid, in turn, powers a
reaction chamber which produces syngas by reducing
water to hydrogen and CO2 to carbon monoxide. To start
with the company is using a nickel-based catalyst and
taking gas from a biomass plant, although it is
developing other processes and will later add dac to the
system. By having some of the transfer #uid pass through
a heat store, to garner a proportion of its thermal load for
later use, the process should be able to operate round the
clock.

On August 17th Synhelion announced that an

experimental plant was producing syngas at “an
industrial scale”, and it is now putting the !nishing
touches to a facility near Cologne, Germany, from which
it hopes, next year, to deliver saf to airlines in the
Lufthansa group. If all goes well it will open a further
plant in Spain, in 2025, to take advantage of higher levels
of sunshine there. By 2030, with additional plants
coming on stream, the !rm’s output could rise to some
850m litres a year—enough to meet around half the
needs of Swiss carriers. The target, by 2040, is 50bn litres
a year. That, if it came to pass, would make a serious dent
in the jet-fuel market

Jetting to a greener future

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Ways to make aviation fuel green | The Economist 27/08/2022, 20:27

Jetting to a greener future

In a separate project, Synhelion has linked up with
cemex, a Mexican company that is one of the world’s
biggest producers of cement. Part of cement-making
involves heating limestone to drive o" CO2. This fact
makes the industry responsible for about 8% of
anthropogenic emissions of the gas. The CO2 in question
is pretty pure, though, and thus itself ideal as a raw
material. Having tested the idea successfully in Spain,
the two companies aim to build a trial plant at one of
cemex’s works. Though making e-fuel in this way would
not be as green as plucking the CO2 concerned from the
atmosphere, it would extract at least some
environmental value from a product that would
otherwise be entirely waste.

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Oil companies are also keen to get in on the act. Repsol, a

Spanish !rm, has teamed up with Saudi Aramco, Saudi
Arabia’s petroleum giant, to build a plant in Bilbao that
will make fuel not just for planes, but also for cars,
lorries and boats, using green hydrogen and CO2 fed from
a nearby oil re!nery. This plant, planned to open in 2024,
will employ a catalytic process developed by Johnson
Matthey, a British chemicals company, to do the Fischer–
Tropsching.

Further down the track, a third approach to making saf,

distinct from employing organic waste or the Fischer-
Tropsch process, is to use biotechnology. One idea which
has been around for a while is to utilise photosynthesis
directly, by engineering single-celled algae to make
conventional drop-ins. Another, suggested in July, is a
decidedly unconventional bioengineered drop-in based
on a molecule made by bacteria to defend themselves
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on a molecule made by bacteria to defend themselves

against fungi. So far, though, these proposals are

con!ned to the laboratory.
One way or another, then, the technology for making
green aircraft fuels does seem to be coming into
existence. Nor need such alternatives replace standard jet
fuel completely to meet the airlines’ carbon-neutral-by-
2050 target, says Sebastian Mikosz, head of environment
and sustainability for iata, the trade group which
represents most of the airline industry. The group’s
calculations suggest saf could account for 65% of
aviation’s carbon mitigation, with the rest coming from
electric and hydrogen-powered aircraft, more-e$cient
airline operations, o"setting emissions and carbon
capture. Yet that still requires 450bn litres of saf a year
by the middle of the century.

Scaling up saf production to such a level may need

government nudging. To this end, Joe Biden’s
administration in America has announced tax credits
and other incentives for saf production as part of the
country’s new spending bill. Instead of carrots, the eu is
using a stick. Member states are being asked to impose
saf targets at individual airports. One proposal suggests
these would rise from 2% in 2025 to 85% by 2050. Get the
incentives right to expand production and reduce costs,
though, and a point may yet come when the
environmentally sensitive can board an aircraft with a
clear conscience. 7

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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition
under the headline "Guilt-free flying"

Science & technology

August 20th 2022

→ Ways to make aviation fuel green

→ Keeping up America’s standards is the job of NIST

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