(243a) Implications of Performance Variables on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Production and Deployment

Jet fuel consumption is expected to double from 2018 to 2050 while accounting for 2.8% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally. This increase in consumption and emissions associated with jet fuels have led to need for alternate technologies for producing sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) from bio-based sources that has the potential to meet the SAF Grand Challenge goals of producing 35 billion gallons of SAF production by 2050 and reducing up to 50% of GHG emissions compared to conventional jet fuels by 2030. While industries, government, and airlines are committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions, SAF is a promising near-tern option for meeting these goals for the transportation sector.

While previous studies have individually looked into analyzing feedstock types or varying the reaction chemistry to boost jet fuel slate in the hydrocarbon fuel mixture, performed resource assessment, techno-economics, or lifecycle GHG emissions analysis, or investigated policies impacting SAF production in general, none of them looked into synergistic impacts of all these performance variables affecting the production of SAF. This knowledge gap on how the combination of different parameters affects the SAF industry is important to identify key hotspots that can help accelerate the deployment of SAF for meeting the decarbonization goals and thus provides a bigger picture of issues at a regional scale.

Because the availability of feedstocks and use of jet fuel vary across locations, we consider Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) in Illinois as a case study based on the passenger data, jet fuel consumption, and feedstock availability, and assess the implications of key performance variables to understand the costs associated with production and delivery of SAF, policy incentives that can help reduce costs, evaluate feedstocks available around Chicago airport (50 to 200-mile radius), determine the reduction in lifecycle GHG emissions for SAF production compared to conventional jet fuel, and discuss infrastructure logistics around ORD for blending SAF with Jet A. We focus our analysis on three ASTM approved SAF conversion technologies including Fischer-Tropsch Synthetic Paraffinic Kerosene (FT-SPK) utilizing woody biomass feedstock, Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids SPK (HEFA-SPK) utilizing fats, oils, and grease (FOG) feedstock, and Alcohol-to-Jet SPK (ATJ-SPK) utilizing crop residues (iso-butanol intermediate). We utilize Biofuel Atlas, Environmental Protection Agency data, and Census Bureau population data for feedstock resource analysis, Aspen Plus process simulation model based discounted cash flow rate of return analysis for techno-economics, and Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) model, SimaPro, and existing literature to estimate emissions associated with various life cycle stages. Policy incentives and infrastructure logistics data were obtained from literature.

Our results show that feedstocks are available within 200-mile of ORD to displace up to 55% of airport’s current conventional jet fuel with lifecycle GHG emissions reductions potentially reaching up to 86% by using SAF rather than Jet A. Also, FT-SPK has the lowest SAF selling price although high upfront capital costs and low jet fuel yield may limit its commercialization. HEFA and ATJ still need technological improvements to beat the market price of Jet A. We find that feedstock price and renewable fuel incentives are key variables affecting the production cost. Moreover, infrastructure is available at ORD to blend SAF with Jet A sourced both locally and from the gulf coast through terminals directly connected via pipelines.

Insights from our analysis can help various stakeholder groups, including aircraft manufacturers, airlines, policymakers, fuel blending/refining companies, farmers, researchers, and agricultural companies and also meet the targets set by SAF Grand Challenge Report. While resources are available to produce SAF and replace a significant portion of Jet A fuel, a detailed supply-chain analysis may need to be performed to allocate resources that compete for production of other hydrocarbon fuels, and common and specialty chemicals.