Sustainable Aviation Fuels from Agricultural Waste

This proposal seeks to develop a novel, cost-competitive and scalable process for manufacturing of 100% bio-based jet fuels ranged branched hydrocarbons, referred here to as Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF), from agricultural and other inedible lignocellulosic biomass waste. These wastes have abundant supply on scale necessary to meet SAF’s commercial demand by Federal and non-Federal aviation industries. Globally over 106 billion gallons of jet fuels are annually consumed for petroleum, accounting for ~2% of global carbon emissions. Only a fraction of jet fuels is currently produced from bio-feedstock. In this project, we will develop an integrated manufacturing processes for SAF production and mitigate scale up challenges arising from oxygenated feed that meets NASA’s net-zero emissions goals of topic described in topic A1.09. The technology platform entails energy-efficient conversion of biomass into low carbon numbers intermediates and their catalytic condensation to SAF consisting of C10-C15 branched hydrocarbons. The team has reported good SAF yield at quantitative conversion of raw materials in the batch process, which exhibited certain scale up challenges. In this project, we will develop a process-intensified integrated manufacturing process for SAF to mitigate challenge observed in the batch process. We will develop reactor modules, develop reaction conditions to obtain SAF that meets Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s SAF composition profile. The reactor module will enable concurrent water removal to debottleneck the scale up challenges. The key technical objectives are: 1.Develop, optimize and validate tubular reactors for unit operations 4 and 5. 2.Determine preliminary kinetic data 3.Tier alpha and beta specification measurements of SAF 4.Perform cost and global warming potentials analyses We aim to produce SAF that meet ASTM metrics and NASA's zero-emission goals. We anticipate a final TRL of 5.