Improving the Economics of Sustainable Aviation Fuels: System-Level Analyses and Perspective.

Abstract

The transportation sector is becoming more electrified in accordance with the energy transition to renewable energy. However, aviation is challenging to decarbonize due to the low energy density of batteries. Specifically, it is difficult to store large-scale batteries in aircraft because there are stringent limitations on weight and space. Therefore, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) should serve as a bridge to battery-powered aircraft untilbattery technology matures to lower transportation-related carbon emissions. It is imperative to produce SAF in a techno-economically feasible manner. Nevertheless, the successful commercialization of SAF is being hampered by the shortcomings of the SAF production processes, such as low efficiency. Therefore, a coproduction strategy is employed to build a new process addressing uncompetitive economics and low carbon efficiency of the SAF production process. The developed process coproduces valuable biochemicals, adipic acid, and furfural, with butene oligomer (i.e., SAF) using lignocellulosic biomass. In this article, comprehensive evaluations including tech no-economic analysis and life-cycle assessment are conducted to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed process. The findings reveal that the proposed approach not only improves the process economics by ≈2.7% but also significantly enhances the environmental sustainability of the process, achieving a reduction of 15.75 kg CO₂ eq kg^-1 SAF.