Startup Aims High With synthetic Jet Fuel Made From Waste

Who needs fossil fuels anymore! Welcome to the age of synthetic fuels!

"Israeli scientists, however, have now developed sustainable [??? synthetic] aviation fuel (SAF) that they say will revolutionize the industry and play a key role in countering climate change.  ...

“This process is able to extract the SAF and [with] actually very good efficiency, and have the [pollutants] very contained in a very sustainable way,” ...

The company says its technology “embraces the diversity of waste streams [thereby] converting much more waste into greener products, while slashing carbon emissions.” ...

The European Commission, meanwhile, has issued a mandate for aviation companies to begin blending SAF into their fuel at EU airports from 2025, beginning with a 2 percent blend next year and rising to 70 percent by 2050.  ..."

Startup Aims High With Green Jet Fuel Made From Waste

Microbe-made syntetic jet fuel

Fossil fuels are so passé! Welcome to the age of synthetic fuels!

"Aviation fuel produced by fermentation

The first commercial-scale plant that produces jet fuel from ethanol is about to come online. The plant, run by US company LanzaJet, will use catalytic steps adopted from the petrochemical industry, but their ultimate goal is to leave much of the catalytic work to microbes. The ethanol used by the plant is already produced by microbes: in a separate process, Clostridium autoethanogenum is fed waste carbon monoxide from places such as steel mills and metabolizes it into the compound. Jet fuel made from waste gases could help feed an aviation industry under pressure to find ‘sustainable’ alternatives to conventional fuel."

"Over the next few months, the world’s first commercial-scale ethanol-to-jet fuel plant will begin producing its first gallons of aviation fuel. The plant, located in Soperton, Georgia and developed by LanzaTech and its spin-out LanzaJet, represents a major milestone in their nearly 20-year effort to turn waste industrial gases into ethanol, and then to jet fuel. ..."

Microbe-made jet fuel | Nature Biotechnology The aviation industry readies to embrace aviation fuel produced by fermentation.

Nature briefing

How to make carbon-neutral jet fuel from sunlight, air and water vapor

Just recycle the CO2 from the air to fuel and back into the air! 

"Jet fuel can now be siphoned from the air. Or at least that’s the case in Móstoles, Spain, where researchers demonstrated that an outdoor system could produce kerosene, used as jet fuel, with three simple ingredients: sunlight, carbon dioxide and water vapor. Solar kerosene could replace petroleum-derived jet fuel in aviation ..."

From the abstract:

"Developing solar technologies for producing carbon-neutral aviation fuels has become a global energy challenge, but their readiness level has largely been limited to laboratory-scale studies. Here, we report on the experimental demonstration of a fully integrated thermochemical production chain from H2O and CO2 to kerosene using concentrated solar energy in a solar tower configuration. The co-splitting of H2O and CO2 was performed via a ceria-based thermochemical redox cycle to produce a tailored mixture of H2 and CO (syngas) with full selectivity, which was further processed to kerosene. The 50-kW solar reactor consisted of a cavity-receiver containing a reticulated porous structure directly exposed to a mean solar flux concentration of 2,500 suns. A solar-to-syngas energy conversion efficiency of 4.1% was achieved without applying heat recovery. This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone toward the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

How to make jet fuel from sunlight, air and water vapor | Science News Solar kerosene could one day provide aviation with a carbon-neutral fuel

A solar tower fuel plant for the thermochemical production of kerosene from H2O and CO2 (open access)