Scientists Find New Way To Power Your Next Flight With Rotten Food
Scientists may have found a way to turn biocrude, a petroleum-like substance created from rotting organic matter, into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which can be used in place of polluting jet fuel. This would be a major breakthrough if it pans out, since biocrude has had trouble finding a use case due to its high oxygen content versus fossil fuels. It also provides a new pathway for producing SAF in the first place, which can power planes while lowering planet-killing emissions by 80%. We're rooting for this one.
Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with help from the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, tested whether molybdenum carbide nanocatalysts, once dispersed onto the mineral zeolite, could remove oxygen from biocrude. They then upgraded the tar-like substance using hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), a process that does in mere minutes what it takes the Earth eons to do — namely, turn dead biomass into explodey stuff that makes engines go vroom.
That all concluded with some very promising results, including complete oxygen removal and a high heating value (HHV) very near to the industry standard fuel, called Jet A. Getting rid of the oxygen is key, since the famously corrosive gas would eat through the actual plane engines, which would be very bad. In addition, this treated substance hit its targets in surface tension, density, freeze point, and other key metrics in order to qualify as SAF. While it's not quite ready to go into aircraft just yet, this is a huge step towards getting there.
There are already a number of ways to make SAF, and it can be made from a variety of sources (called feedstocks), including vegetable oils, fats, and greases. Did you flush your leftovers down the disposal last night? Should have put it in an airplane instead, it could have flown to Argentina with that.
Okay, not quite. But 360,000 commercial flights have already been powered by SAF, and Virgin Atlantic recently flew an entire flight with 100% SAF, so this is a proven technology that works. Plus, it just slots right into existing infrastructure; it can be piped through the same pipes and pumped into the same planes as ordinary fuel, so nothing needs to be re-engineered. It's a truly drop-in solution. The trick, as it ever is, is money. Right now, SAF is just more expensive than petroleum jet fuel, and given that fuel is one of an airline's highest costs, switching to it just isn't going to happen on its own. Either governments will need to subsidize SAF, or SAF will need to get cheaper. Plus, for the industry to switch over entirely, we're going to need to be able to make a lot more of the stuff.
The breakthrough these scientists have made doesn't necessarily solve those problems immediately, but it does open up another pathway to the production of SAF. The more we know about making the stuff, the likelier we'll find a cost-efficient solution. In this case, it also has the benefit of giving biocrude, which has otherwise struggled to find a use case, a new lease on life.
Air travel accounts for 2% of CO2 emissions globally, and fully 12% from the transportation sector, per the U.S. Department of Energy. Due to battery weight, electric planes for commercial use aren't plausible. So if aviation wants to go green, the best way to do it is with SAF, which creates 80% fewer net emissions. In other words, that banana peel rotting in your trash right now just might save the planet, if we can just find a way to turn it into jet fuel on the cheap.
