Victor Tango Foxtrot – The pursuit of affordable Sustainable Aviation Fuels at scale

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 the new, 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, 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. Soybean oil recently topped 70 cents a gallons, and if you begin with the rule of thumb that you need eight pounds of plant oil to make a gallon of HEFA fuel, you can see the cost problem right away.

Worried about $5 gasoline? Try $10 plant-based jet fuel, maybe $8. Yes, parts of the world are replete in carbon support, but not everywhere, and not forever.

The source of the tech

The problem is not the fuel or the sustainable attributes, but the price of the feedstock, and 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.

The allure of VTF

Why is everyone excited about AD as a route to jet fuel? Three technical reasons and one commentarial. I’ll explain.

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.

Point is, the feedstock is cheap, abundant, and no one is using it for anything more lucrative than generating cheap electric power. You can get an awful lot of crop waste at 6 cents a pound — in the Billion Ton Report series, the DOE say you can get more than 300 million tons of it in the US alone at that price.  Third, crop waste is as low as you can go when it comes to carbon.

Summing it up? Affordable, available, sustainable

So, what’s the commercial reason? Yes, there’s the price, but it’s more than that. Alder was founded by Bryan Sherbacow — at AltAir (mow World Energy) he led the development and deployment of HEFA fuels at scale. When the US Navy paid $2.16 per gallon for sustainable fuels at the conclusion of the Great Green Fleet project, it was AltAir fuel. 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.

“We can now scale up supply to meet the aviation industry’s demand,” Sherbacow told The Digest. “This partnership with Boeing will expedite SAF availability around the globe, advance policies that ensure sustainability and foster environmental justice, and cultivate local economies.”

Boeing knows the scale that has to be achieved.

Sheila Remes, Boeing’s vice president of Environmental Sustainability told The Digest that “the civil aviation industry’s commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, we know that 700 – 1,000 times more SAF is needed in order to meet this goal. We also know that according to the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. forestry and agricultural residues alone could provide enough biomass energy to generate enough SAF jet fuel to displace 75 percent of U.S. aviation fuel consumption. Partnerships like those with Alder enable us all to advocate for and scale SAF supply.” 

The Project

Boeing will support testing and qualification of Alder-derived SAF including flight demonstrations to ensure readiness. According to the Air Transport Action Group, an industry coalition focused on sustainability, the single largest opportunity to meet and go beyond the industry’s 2050 goal is the rapid and worldwide scaling up of sustainable aviation fuel and new energy sources.

The Boeing backstory

 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. The company has worked with airlines, engine manufacturers and other industry leaders to qualify and conduct biofuel test flights in 2008 and gain approval for commercial use in 2011. In 2018, the Boeing ecoDemonstrator flight test program made the world’s first commercial airplane flight using 100% sustainable fuels with a 777 Freighter, in collaboration with FedEx Express. In addition, Boeing partnered with U.S. government customers on SAF initiatives which include SAF flight tests with the U.S. Navy on an F/A-18 Super Hornet and with an in-depth fuel study with the Air Force as part of their efforts to certify the C-17 Globemaster to use SAF.

The Alder Fuels backstory

Alder’s research is supported by the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of Energy (DOE), and through a partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which is focused on developing technology to process organic waste and sustainable, non-food plant material into carbon-negative transportation fuels. For more information about Alder Fuels, visit alderfuels.com. 

The Bottom Line

We don’t need SAF. We need ASAF — that is, affordable, sustianable aviation fuels — and ASAP. Is the callsign Victor Tango Foxtrot? That’s is, Volatile Fatty Aids – to – Fuels?

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.

That’s worth cheering about, as we await the next round of developments on Plant Alder.

https://www.alderfuels.com/latest-news/boeing-and-alder-fuels-partner-to-scale-sustainable-aviation-fuel-globally