Sustainable aviation fuel is a rerun of the ethanol hype
From about a month ago:
Flint Hills Resources’ Pine Bend Refinery is Minnesota’s biggest petroleum refinery and single largest human-made source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The sprawling Rosemount complex is also the primary supplier of jet fuel to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In July, it’ll take an important step to reduce that product’s impact – and to clean up its operations overall – when it commissions what it says will be the United States’ biggest sustainable aviation fuel blending facility outside California.
The new unit will mix biofuel derived from crops, animal byproducts and even used cooking oil with jet fuel distilled from petroleum. Federal regulations allow blends containing up to 50% sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF…
A broad group of Minnesota companies, nonprofits and state agencies want to change that. They say Minnesota is uniquely positioned to become not just a national but a global hub for SAF production within the next 15 years or so – and they have a strong case.
(MinnPost)
This hype reminds me tremendously of the early years of the disaster that is ethanol fuel. Remember “energy independence” and how in short order the technology would be there to produce endless quantities of practically free ethanol from any kinds of scraggly weeds? Which hasn’t happened. What has happened is massive profits and associated political power for Big Ag, which ranks with the last things we need any more of. And speaking of ridiculous claims related to jet fuel, remember how the internet was going to make business travel obsolete?
Regarding those scraggly weeds:
Crops grown between food harvest cycles or on low-quality land are seen as green solutions for powering planes, but T&E’s new study shows that so-called “intermediate crops” or crops grown on “severely degraded land” could only meet 4% of the EU’s demand for bio-SAF by 2050.
(CleanTechnica)
And in the bigger picture, if SAF does show signs of becoming a big deal:
The impacts on the global landscape could be dramatic. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that producing about 10 percent of U.S. jet fuel from SAF by 2030 — an explicit Biden Administration goal — would require about half the U.S. soybean crop, occupying enough farmland to cover the state of Nebraska. Princeton senior research scholar Tim Searchinger has calculated that using vegetable oils like soybean for one fourth of global aviation fuel would require 40 percent of global cropland, an area twice the size of India. Flying a plane with corn ethanol would be particularly inefficient; it takes 1.7 gallons of ethanol to make a gallon of jet fuel, and producing ethanol uses almost as much fossil fuel as ethanol replaces.
(YaleEnvironment360)
Which is why I doubt that, barring a massive technological breakthrough in production, which has yet to happen with ethanol even after decades, SAF is going to get big. But plenty of people are going to do their best to get very wealthy – or in many cases more accurately very much more wealthy – off it in any case, including via government subsidies and market manipulations. Sound familiar?
Thanks for your feedback. If we like what you have to say, it may appear in a future post of reader reactions.