Sustainable Aviation Fuel Faces Headwinds

The aviation industry is working to convert to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) fast enough to hit emission reduction targets. However, that effort faces major turbulence, according to industry experts.

Tim Clark, president of the Emirates airline, recently told Australia’s SkyTV that government mandates to convert to the fuel are unrealistic given current refining investment and collateral costs such as imposing additional pressure on agricultural land.

Government support could be increased “on the policy side with a stroke of a pen,” which would at least level the field between biodiesel and SAF producers, said Steve Csonka, executive director of the U.S.-based Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI). He told BJT that SAF producers are at a disadvantage when it comes to competition for refining resources because producing biodiesel “is more profitable.”

Civil aviation accounts for 2 percent of global CO2 and 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Business aviation’s emissions output is estimated at 0.04 percent, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Governmental bodies worldwide have adopted a goal of achieving net-zero aviation emissions by 2050, with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) contributing 70 percent and new-generation aircraft powered by technologies including batteries and hydrogen accounting for the other 30 percent.

Decarbonization is a key plank of most government and industry environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards and scoring, and the National Business Aviation Association has made it the centerpiece of its new “Climbing Fast” sustainability campaign.

SAF can be refined agricultural feedstocks, wastes, or plant oils. It burns considerably cleaner than jet-A fuel and can be used in turbine engine aircraft right now. Energy giant BP estimates that SAF provides up to an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions over the lifecycle of the traditional jet fuel it replaces. The exact amount depends on the concentration of the blend and the carbon inputs used to make the fuel and deliver it to airports. 

The White House's SAF Grand Challenge set lofty goals for the production of sustainable aviation fuel. Now the U.S. Government Accountability Office is recommending that the agencies on point for the project develop and implement monitoring criteria to determine whether industry is on track to meet those goals. (Photo: Curt Epstein/AIN)

An SAF ‘Grand Challenge’

Hitting the goal for SAF requires the production of 35 billion gallons of the fuel just in the United States by 2050, under the U.S. government–sponsored private-public partnership initiative called the “SAF Grand Challenge.”

While numerous business aviation companies have demonstrated the ability of their aircraft to fly on SAF as a drop-in fuel, akin to ethanol in automobile gas, and even 100 percent SAF, last year the U.S. produced a mere 25 million gallons, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Currently available SAF is a 10 to 30 percent blend added to jet-A and available at 32 U.S. airports—predominately on the West Coast—where it commands a price premium of $2 to $3 per gallon compared with straight jet-A. (SAF is also available at 17 European locations and is often delivered to industry events such as aviation conventions. Many aircraft and engine manufacturers have pledged to significantly increase its use for their training, flight test, and maintenance operations.)

While SAF is not yet readily available in most markets, aircraft owners and operators can still tap its benefits via the book-and-claim scheme, whereby participants purchase SAF credits from fuel suppliers that then sell the SAF as conventional fuel without any sustainability claims. The credit purchaser can claim SAF emissions reductions toward their greenhouse gas emission goals, which is particularly helpful for ESG scoring. Carbon offsets also can be purchased for flights that can add anywhere from $20 to $600 to hourly operating costs. These services are available from companies such as 4Air and Universal Weather or directly through fractional, membership, and charter companies.

The short-term Grand Challenge goal is to boost the 25 million gallon SAF output in 2023 to three billion gallons by 2030. That alone will require the annual doubling of production between now and then, according to CAAFI’s Csonka.

Csonka points to significant production increases, including recently announced biofuel refining projects that—coupled with increased imports from industry leaders including the Finnish company Neste—could add almost a billion gallons of capacity over the next three to four years. Those facilities include an ethanol-to-SAF conversion plant that opened in January in Soperton, Georgia; a plant that will annually be able to make up to 230 million gallons of biodiesel and SAF in Great Falls, Montana once plant expansion underway is completed; and the $1.25 billion conversion of the existing Phillips 66 Rodeo refinery near San Francisco to make both biodiesel and SAF beginning next year.

U.S. biodiesel production increased from three billion to four billion gallons between 2022 and 2023 and $6 billion recently flowed into the biofuel sector to increase production capacity, noted Kurt Kovarik, vice president of federal affairs for Clean Fuels Alliance America, on a recent Agritalk podcast. Just how much of that capacity gets pumped into SAF production is an open question, said Csonka, who noted that the Grand Challenge “is not fully funded.”

Renewable Diesel’s Profit Potential

But it is unlikely that all that capacity will be devoted to SAF, he said, due to the profit delta between biodiesel and SAF. “Anybody who's working in this space to produce a renewable middle distillate fuel is likely going to gravitate in the direction of renewable diesel because they're going to make more money,” Csonka said.

This is largely due to the greater consumption of renewable/biodiesel and the government subsidies that accompany it, which include a $1 per gallon tax credit as well as a plethora of other government programs directed at producers. These involve payments of up to 50 percent of the costs of establishing a biomass feedstock and up to 50 percent of the cost of establishing a biomass refinery, biofuel production payments, advanced energy research project grants, alternative fuel infrastructure tax credits, and several other incentive mechanisms, many of which are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Their potential total value is hundreds of millions of dollars.

Both the U.S. House and Senate recently introduced legislation known as the “Farm to Fly Act” that would make SAF producers eligible for the USDA programs. Additionally, in September, the FAA announced $245 million in funding for SAF infrastructure projects in addition to $557 million the agency had already awarded or invested in recent sustainable aviation projects and research.

While “Farm to Fly” legislation is pending, the main government incentive driving SAF is the per-gallon blender’s fuel credit contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. In December, the IRS set that credit, paid to SAF producers, at $1.25 per gallon, provided the fuel reduces lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent compared with straight jet-A, with an extra penny per gallon for each percentage point above 50 to a maximum credit of $1.75. The scoring will be measured under a standard being developed by the Argonne National Laboratory called GREET, which stands for Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation. Argonne plans to release the specifics for GREET in March. A robust blender’s credit could make the price difference between straight jet-A and SAF nearly de minimis and encourage greater uptake.

But satisfying GREET requirements could be complicated, warned Csonka. The conversion into SAF of corn ethanol, currently used in auto fuels, is likely the most direct pathway. This is the technology to be employed at the LanzaJet Freedom Pines Fuels facility in Soperton, Georgia, a refinery that is expected to produce up to 10 million gallons of SAF and renewable diesel annually. The problem with converting this kind of ethanol to SAF is that it is likely to generate a low GREET score and there is insufficient production capacity—just 18 billion gallons annually for both ground and air transportation needs. (Aviation alone currently needs 26 billion gallons of jet-A annually.) “If you converted every ethanol refinery in the U.S. today [to SAF production], it wouldn't satisfy the total demand for jet fuel,” Csonka said. “It will help, but it doesn’t bridge the gap.” 

LanzaJet's new Freedom Pines SAF plant in Georgia represents the first of its kind. Utilizing the company's ethanol-to-SAF production process, its pure SAF—derived from a wide range of sustainable feedstocks—can reduce lifecycle greenhouse emissions by more than 70 percent compared with conventional petroleum-based jet fuel.

Converting Ethanol to SAF

Converting ethanol to SAF with current technology is “a relatively low-cost way to significantly boost jet-A production” but it is not “carbon-intensity feasible” and won’t achieve the CO2 reduction targets of the Grand Challenge, he noted. (However, its GREET score could be improved via the use of renewables such as wind and solar to generate refining power and facilitate delivery and via more sustainable agricultural practices along with carbon capture, reuse, and sequestration.)

But converting Brazilian sugar cane ethanol to SAF will do the trick, according to Clean Fuels’ Kovarik. Csonka agrees and said the dichotomy could set up an interesting trade model where American corn ethanol is swapped for Brazilian sugar cane ethanol or even the establishment of large SAF plants in that country.

But how helpful will SAF be in the race to reduce emissions? Not very, according to Jeff Gibbs, who along with filmmaker Michael Moore, produced Planet of the Humans, a 2019 documentary that’s highly critical of the environmental impact of the “green energy” movement. Gibbs told BJT, “If you ask yourself, ‘Fossil fuels aren’t destroying the planet fast enough, how can we destroy it faster?’ [the answer is] to turn the living planet into a replacement. And that includes using biomass for aviation fuel.”

Gibbs said the decision to declare biofuels and biomass carbon neutral dates from the international Kyoto environmental protocols negotiated in 1997 and doesn’t make much sense due to skewed scoring that carries over to today’s standards. Gibbs used trees as an example. “When you log a tree, you are supposed to score that as a carbon hit on the forest. You’ve just destroyed the ability of that tree to grow and sequester carbon. And if you don’t count it there, you are supposed to count it when you burn it. I think you should count it both places. What they [Kyoto signatories] decided to do was to count it in neither place.”

According to Gibbs, the only times worldwide carbon emissions ever declined were during world wars, the Great Depression, the recession of 2008–2009, and the COVID pandemic. Even using corn, sugars, seed, or recycled cooking oils for SAF requires a heavy carbon input from fossil fuels, he noted. “Think about what they are saying: ‘We’re going to use the crops and/or waste products of a giant, planet-destroying agricultural system based on fossil fuels to bring you a replacement for fossil fuels. If we can pretend [we are not polluting] with some complex carbon accounting, then we’re all good.’ This is not a way out. It’s a fool’s errand if there ever was one and to me, it’s more of a religious effort to absolve us of our sins.” 

Photo: David McIntosh

Environmental Groups Continue Protests

It's an absolution that a variety of environmental activist groups aren’t granting. They continue their worldwide struggle against private aviation, blocking airport access roads, chaining themselves to airport gates and aircraft, and vandalizing aircraft. Chief among them, an organization that calls itself Extinction Rebellion or XR, that among other things, picketed New York’s West 30^th Street heliport in an unsuccessful attempt to shut it down last September. An XR spokesman said it targeted the heliport as part of an attack on an “economic system that places pleasure over planetary survival” and discounted any environmental benefits from emerging all-electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, proclaiming that “simply electrifying wasteful, unnecessary transportation will not avert the [environmental] catastrophes we’re already seeing.”

XR was at it again this week, picketing the Farnborough airport outside London with a large banner proclaiming “Ban Private Jets,” this time with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who maintains the world is “at the beginning of a mass extinction.”

One thing is certain, whether you believe it is environmentally beneficial or not, the switch to SAF is all but inevitable and will increase the cost of flying. “These things all cost money and will take a substantial period of time,” said CAAFI’s Csonka. “Nothing is as cheap or as unsophisticated as continuing to pull crude out of the ground.”