Below is the text version of the webinar "Sustainable Aviation Fuel Strategy at the Bioenergy Technologies Office" held on August 26, 2021.
[Begin audio]
Erik Ringle, National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
Well good morning and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to today's webinar, Sustainable Aviation Fuel Strategy at the Bioenergy Technologies Office. I'm Erik Ringle from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Before we get started, I'd like to touch on a few housekeeping items so you know how you can participate today. During the webinar you will be in listen only mode. You can select audio connection options to listen to your computer audio or you can dial into your phone. For the best connection, we do recommend calling in through a phone line. You may submit questions for our speakers today using the separate Q&A panel. If you are in the full screen view, click the question mark icon located on the floating toolbar at the lower right hand side of your screen. If you are in split screen mode, the Q&A panel is already open and is located at the lower right hand of your screen. To submit your question, please select all panelists in that Q&A drop down menu, type in your question or comments, and press enter on your keyboard. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation. We will then collect those and address them during the Q&A session at the end. If you have technical difficulties today or need help during today's session, you can use the chat section to reach me. The chat section is distinct from the Q&A panel; it appears as a comment bubble in your control panel. We are also recording this webinar. It will be posted on the Bioenergy Technologies Office website at a later date along with these slides. Please see the URL provided on the screen here.
Now a quick disclaimer. This webinar including all audio and images of participants and presentation materials may be recorded, saved, edited, distributed, used internally, posted on the U.S. Department of Energy's website, or otherwise made publicly available. If you continue to access this webinar and provide such audio or image content, you consent to such use by or on behalf of DOE and the government for government purposes and acknowledge that you will not inspect or approve or be compensated for such use. All right, without further ado I now like to turn things over to Justin Rickard to introduce our topic and speakers today. Go ahead Justin.
Justin Rickard, National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
All right thanks, Erik. Can you hear me?
Erik Ringle:
Yes! You sound great.
Justin Rickard:
Excellent! I appreciate it.
So and welcome everybody. I'm Justin Rickard with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Just a few more items before we get to the presentation. This webinar is brought to you by the Bioenergy Communicators Working Group, also known as BioComms. This group is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Bioenergy Technologies Office, also known as BETO. The BioComms working group includes bioenergy communicators, laboratory relationship managers, and education and workforce development professionals from the national labs and BETO who gather once a month to strategize on how to effectively communicate and promote BETO funded research and development to the public. The BioComms Working Group also provides the public the opportunity to learn about current and emerging bioenergy technologies, projects, and partnerships through monthly webinars.
Which brings me to the agenda for today's presentation. Acting Director of BETO Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed will give an overview of the work at the Bioenergy Technologies Office as well as the program's sustainable aviation fuel strategy. You'll notice that throughout the presentation the phrase sustainable aviation fuel will be used as SAF or "SAF" and then Zia Haq, a Senior Analyst at BETO, will provide more insight into aviation sector staff commitments as well as shed some light on SAF technologies and current SAF research.
So now a little bit about today's presenters. As the Acting Director for the Bioenergy Technologies Office, Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed oversees efforts to improve performance, lower costs, and accelerate market entry of advanced biofuels and bioproducts. She has more than 28 years of experience in addressing energy and environmental issues faced by the United States and globally. In addition to her programmatic activities, she leads the Operations Committee of the Interagency Biomass Research and Development Board which is an interagency effort to advance the energy aspects of the bioeconomy. She had the honor of serving for the chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helping to build bridges between the two agencies. Science has been a key component of her professional career and education. She came from a family devoted to science. Her father was a chemical engineer in agricultural biochemistry and her mother led the science department at a local high school. Dr. Sarisky-Reed holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Georgetown University.
Our second speaker, Zia Haq, is a Senior Analyst with BETO working on biofuels for the Aviation and Marine sectors and he provides strategic support to the analysis and sustainability activities of BETO. He has worked for DOE over 20 years and has more than 25 years of experience in the energy sector. Prior to joining DOE, Zia worked at Southern Company Services in the area of coal gasification. Zia has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
Before I hand it over to Dr. Sarisky-Reed, I'd like to remind you that you can ask questions at any time during the presentation using the Q&A panel. We will collect these and try to address them during the Q&A session at the end of the presentation. All right next slide and Valerie please take it away.
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed, Bioenergy Technologies Office:
Thank you so much, Justin. I'm really happy to be here today. I'm going to start very quickly by reminding everyone that the Bioenergy Technologies Office has been part of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for at least three decades now. We may have been called different things, but we certainly have been around for a long time. The office originated from the need to develop a domestic source of liquid fuels for the United States who at that time was importing over 60 percent of our petroleum needs for transportation. Initial work was on ethanol. We were looking to fuel flexible fuel vehicles up to E85 which is ethanol at 85 percent. And while that market didn't really materialize, ethanol as an oxygenate blend in gasoline did and ethanol produced from starch ramped up to 16 billion gallons to meet the needs of this market. At this point, DOE turned its attentions and learnings on cellulosic and waste feedstocks to the production of renewable hydrocarbons that could potentially provide fuels across the whole spectrum from diesel, marine, rail, and aviation uses as well as looking at chemicals which could replace existing petroleum chemicals. Today we're going to talk a little bit about where that strategy has gone and what we're focused on. Next slide please.
So the mission of the Bioenergy Technologies Office is to conduct research, development, and demonstration. We are trying to advance technologies that can convert domestic biomass and waste resources into cost-effective, low-carbon biofuels and bioproducts. We work very closely with our national labs, with industry, and with academia to try to accomplish our goals. Our investments in cutting edge technologies have helped to expand the type and amount of biomass and waste resources that are available for energy use. This includes forest and agriculture residues, municipal solid waste, trees, switch grass, algae, and more. We are literally growing our energy future. Next slide please.
Developing a domestic bioeconomy will have many benefits. It can increase support for our national security, because we will now rely on fuels that are developed, grown, and produced in this country. It will create American jobs. It will boost economic growth. And it can encourage investment across the nation. The United States continues to lead the development of innovations in this space and that helps to advance our overall U.S. competitiveness globally in the energy and bioproduct markets. By maximizing the use of this abundant biomass resource and doing it sustainably, we are helping to secure rural America's economic future. And finally lowering greenhouse gases and all of the ecosystem services that biomass can provide will improve the quality of life for all Americans. Next slide please.
So this slide is how the biomass program is currently structured. BETO's portfolio addresses technology uncertainty at each stage of the supply chain. A few of the most significant challenges that we face include the cost and variability of the feedstock supply, how we handle those feedstocks, feeding these feedstocks into a reactor we need to understand the sizing and moisture content so that we can do appropriate pre-treatment, we need resilient catalysts and bio-catalysts to use for conversion, and we're looking to upgrade intermediates to valuable end products. So specifically looking at the different parts of our program our feedstock supply or feedstock technologies program is focused on developing cost-effective integrated logistics systems. This looks at growing, harvesting, collecting and storing, pre-processing handling, and transporting that feedstock to the throat of the reactor at the biorefinery. This includes our algal systems, which is really a feedstock that is just treated a little bit differently than terrestrials. Our conversion R&D program is focused on developing commercially viable technologies that can take both these terrestrial and algal feedstocks and convert them into liquid fuels as well as potentially bioproducts. We do this with two routes: our biochemical conversion route - which is looking to produce sugars or other carbohydrate intermediates and then follow that by conversion to finished products and we look at it thermochemically where we're focused on pathways that produce bio-oil or gas intermediates and then upgrade these to final products. Our systems development and integration program focuses then on scaling up these promising technologies through the pilot and demonstration scale so that they can further be validated and verified and move on to commercialization. We, also, support an important cross-cutting program and this is in our data modeling and analysis area where we're proactively working to address issues and concerns surrounding sustainability of advanced biomass and bioenergy technologies. We conduct key analysis here. Also, to help plan how we develop and how our portfolio moves forward. Next slide please.
You can actually go on one more if you don't mind.
All right so now we're getting into the heart of what we're doing today. The transportation sector is the largest carbon emitting sector. Therefore biofuels used for transportation has been BETO's primary focus for the majority of our program's lifetime. More specifically though now, we are looking at those modes of transportation that are hard to electrify. They have no other options if they're going to become low-carbon modes of transportation. Aviation certainly is the clearest opportunity for biofuels to have impact. It is the largest of the difficult-to-electrify modes of transportation and it is also projected to grow the most over time. The other hard to electrify opportunities include marine, rail, and parts of the heavy duty trucking sector. Our strategy to decarbonize aviation with biofuels means that we're turning our attention to the development of a robust sustainable aviation fuel industry. Next slide please.
So what exactly are sustainable aviation fuels? These fuels are produced from sustainable feedstocks. Which means renewable feedstocks such as agricultural residues or forest residues and wastes like MSW, landfill waste gases, and organic food waste. Using sustainable aviation fuels results in the reduction of carbon emissions compared to traditional jet fuels and as they are replaced over the whole life cycle of the fuel. The chemical and physical characteristics of SAF are almost identical to those of the conventional fuels and they can be safely mixed with petroleum fuels at varying degrees or used exclusively at 100 percent in certain engines. The term sustainable though is very important here. We want to be sure that we're developing these fuel to not only take into account greenhouse gas reductions, but the amount of water usage and appropriate land usage that goes into making these fuels. Next slide please.
The Biden Administration has set very aggressive decarbonization goals across the entire economy and this has had a major effect on where markets are headed. We're seeing unprecedented interest in finding alternatives to fossil-based fuels which is helping drive demand for these fuels. But there are other benefits that we will reap associated with the robust biofuels market and the use of biomass. Wastes, today, are a huge emitter of carbon as well as other pollutants and odors that are impacting the communities where landfills are sited. Having a market like sustainable aviation fuel for these non-recyclable wastes will dramatically alter the landfill situation. Removing waste from forests can result in reduction of catastrophic forest fires and improve overall forest health. Using agricultural residues can increase the value of the crops produced by the farmer. And with the use of a winter cash crop planted between harvests, the farmer improves his soil and food production and increases revenues from biomass to energy. I could go on with these benefits, but most of all I want to point out that the ecosystem services are continually being evaluated through our sustainability work so that we have a better understanding of these issues. Next slide please.
So I've spent a lot of time talking about DOE, but I want you to fully realize that we recognize the need for the entire government to help support the true development of a sustainable aviation fuel industry. We have an interagency working group, formed a few years ago, to study this issue and it's ramping up activities now to help understand the barriers and leverage capabilities across the different agencies. As you can see here, many agencies are involved but three primary agencies include not only DOE, but USDA and the Department of Transportation. Next slide please.
This graphic isn't sustainable aviation fuel specific, but it does identify the scope of the effort that we're undertaking here. The innovations from the laboratory—which are on the left-hand side of this graphic—are where we have been spending the majority of our time over the last decade. We're systematically helping to reduce the cost of the various technologies and understanding these innovations at the bench scale, but now we're moving into scale-up. In the next few years, BETO will be emphasizing this scale-up activity, which you can see on the right hand side of this graphic. As you can see, this is an expensive and risky endeavor. With this will come the need for increased financial investment by the industry as well as the ability to reduce the risk so that they can see this is a viable business proposition. Next slide please.
While this may be difficult, this is an effort that is very worthwhile so we're beginning to really set goals and establish where we need to go to build this industry. Reducing cost of the fuel has always been an important part of the Bioenergy program. The lower we can get these costs through technology improvements, the easier it will be to get into the market. But I don't want anyone to mistake us for being able to compete directly with petroleum. Petroleum is and has been very low for a long time. It is really the carbon benefits that these fuels bring that add value. So we will need to be looking towards policies and incentives, particularly in the near term, if we're able to really make a mark in this industry.
One way that we are looking to drive down costs, though, is by increasing our focus on co-products. These are higher value products that can help meet the needs of the chemical market. They help reduce the risk of the development that we're doing and can be an important consideration moving forward in hoping to demonstrate both fuels and chemicals in biorefineries. If we're successful and we're able to maximize the use of biomass to meet both the fuel demand this country has as well as biochemicals, we estimate that with the biomass we have available sustainably in this country we can reduce CO2 emissions by over 450 million metric tons and provide one million direct jobs in this industry. So as I said, this effort is really worthwhile. Next slide please.
This is my last slide and I just wanted to put this out there to show you that our efforts have already begun. In FY21, we offered two funding opportunities to overcome barriers to the production of sustainable aviation fuels. The first was in our feedstock area looking at advanced knowledge of the characteristics and collection of wastes as well as increasing the productivity of algal systems to reduce overall costs. The other was to look at our scale-up and conversion activities. We're looking to reduce the cost of clean sugars derived from biomass that will go on to the conversion of fuels and chemicals. We're looking to advance separation technologies to improve overall conversion. And of course we have our pre-pilot pilot and demonstration scale opportunity where we want to partner with industry to bring promising technologies closer to commercial development. For more about these opportunities, I really welcome you to come to our website and to contact the program in the near future. I'm going to stop here and introduce Zia Haq our lead analyst. He's going to dig a little bit deeper into the technology behind sustainable aviation fuels.
Zia!
Zia Haq, Bioenergy Technologies Office:
Great! Thank you Valerie for that introduction and I hope you can all hear me fine.
Justin Rickard:
Yes. That's great, Zia.
Zia Haq:
Okay, great. So, yes, thank you and welcome to all of you for your time. Let's go on to the next slide.
So in addition to our interest in biofuels for the aviation sector, there's been a significant amount of commitment made by the airline industry to decarbonize aviation. I think you've heard the news stories from Europe and elsewhere. There's just a lot of interest in trying to see how we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from aviation and hard to decarbonized sectors. The airline industry trade association ATAG has published this kind of a scenario of where they see the greenhouse gas emissions trajectory over the next few years. And as you can see their goal is for a 50% reduction of GHG levels from 2005 levels by 2050. And there are different elements that can meet that goal or help meet that goal. There's more efficient engines, more efficient airframe improvements in operation. Making sure there's a reduced amount of deviations in the root system and so forth and climb and descent structures are optimized. Then there's sustainable aviation fuels and carbon offsets. So all of these will play a role and the graphic at the bottom shows the potential proportion of commitment that might be available from each one of these different options. And you can see that there is going to have to be a significant role of sustainable aviation fuels in order to meet that 50% reduction. There is some improvement that can be achieved by airframe technology and improvements in operations, but to get really big reduction in emissions, the aviation industry realizes that they will have to rely on sustainable aviation fuels. That's the interest from their side and of course we are trying to mature the technology so that they are available for the aviation industry to meet those needs. Next slide please.
This is just a kind of a handful of public announcements that have been made for sustainable aviation field production facilities over the next few years. You can see that there's a variety of companies that are listed here and some of these projects are overseas but some are in the United States. So there's growing interest from these companies utilizing a variety of feedstocks and a variety of conversion technologies. And this is from the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative, or CAAFI. They are estimating approximately a billion gallons or so of potential sustainable aviation fuels development over the next few years. So this is very, very good news. The current production levels are very low, less than a billion gallons. And so we definitely see that there's a lot of interest by the biofuel production community to try to step up and make these commercial scale facilities in the near future. Next slide please.
So we have done some analysis of the amount of biomass that is available in the United States and we have a report that has been published on that topic called the Billion Ton Study. That is available publicly. What that shows is that there's approximately 1 billion tons of biomass available in the United States that can be sustainably utilized for a variety of different purposes. In the Billion Ton Study, we don't go into where that biomass would be utilized or how it would be utilized. We just say that there is approximately a billion tons available. We've done some analysis subsequent to that which has looked at trying to allocate that resource to different sectors and that's the result that you see here in these bar graphs. And so what we what we are finding is that if you take that potential supply bar at the far right—which is a future supply, not current supply, but a future supply—and you stack those different elements like agricultural, forest residue, municipal solid waste, and all these other categories up together, you can meet the needs of the aviation, the rail, and the marine sectors, and partially the needs of the heavy duty trucking sector. There is a substantial resource, a waste-based biomass resource, that is available out there that can be utilized for this purpose. It's not currently available, but in the future it can be with some policy incentives as well as some research and development achievements. So that's really the takeaway from this graphic. We have three sustainable aviation fuels demonstration projects - Fulcrum, Redrock, and LanzaTech. If you are interested in more information on these projects, we would be happy to provide you with those or put you in touch with the project managers who oversee those projects. We do have a current market for ethanol that Valerie alluded to which is about 17 billion gallons of production. This is from corn kernel and we are looking at waste-based feedstocks, but we could in the future envision even corn kernel utilization for sustainable aviation fuels provided we can reduce the greenhouse gas emission on a life cycle basis down to sufficient levels. This assessment that we did and Valerie alluded to the 450 million metric tons of CO2 reduction—which is consistent with these numbers—did not include any technologies for CO2 utilization. CO2 utilization is a new area that we are looking into to see if in addition to the biomass resources if there's additional resources available by taking carbon dioxide out of the air. You can take carbon dioxide either out of the air or out of industrial emission sources such as ethanol plants or refineries or cement manufacturing facilities and so forth. And so in this assessment that I'm showing here we did not include any CO2 utilization technologies, but that is an area that is very interesting and could potentially substantially increase the amount of available fuels from CO2 if we can make that technology work. So that also is a small part of our research portfolio. We try to look at longer-term technology options that might have a very critical role in meeting the decarbonization goals of the sector. Okay and next slide.
So I'll talk a little bit about technologies and the research and then I think we'll transition into questions pretty soon. So I won't spend too much time on this, but there's a lot of detail and a lot of information and I'm just really synthesizing all of this in a few slides. Next slide please.
These are the broad categories of conversion pathways that we are looking at for sustainable aviation fuels. So there's hydro-processed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA, mainly using fat, solids, and greases. Alcohol-to-jet, gasification, pyrolysis, hydrothermal liquefaction, and then electrochemical conversion of CO2. So of these pathways, our view is that the HEFA process is commercially viable and commercially available today and does not need any or much research and development, but all the other pathways that are listed here do need substantial amounts of R&D in order to reduce the cost and make them even more sustainable than they are today. And so those are the areas that we are really working on at DOE; the alcohol-to-jet and on down that list. There is a substantial amount of work also going on at USDA on the HEFA process utilizing both fat solids and greases as well as oil seed crops. There are new varieties of oil seed crops that are being developed by USDA funding that have very reduced amounts of input needs and therefore reductions in life cycle greenhouse gas emissions that look very promising. So there's some work going on there, but our emphasis at DOE has been on these other pathways that have mostly relied on waste-based feedstocks for the conversion process. This is just to give you a very quick overview of conversion technologies. There's obviously, as you can imagine, a lot more detail behind this and we'd be happy to get into that more during the Q&A. Next slide please.
This is just one example that I had talked about which is LanzaTech. LanzaTech uses ethanol and then goes through an oligomerization and hydrogenation step to make a renewable jet and diesel and they've done some test flights and everything has gone very successfully. They are focusing on the use of waste gases—from refineries, steel mill, off gases, and so forth—to make the ethanol and then from that ethanol they're going into sustainable aviation fuels through the alcohol-to-jet process. They are actually building commercial scale facilities in Europe and China and India, so their technology has progressed nicely from a lab pilot to a demo scale and eventually to commercial scale. So this is one of the examples of new alcohol-to-jet processes that could play a role in decarbonizing the aviation sector. And there are others but we just wanted to highlight one for the sake of time. Next slide please.
Okay, I think that was the end of my slides and I'll turn it over to Valerie for saying a few things about this potential event. Valerie did you want to say a few things?
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Sure, Zia. Thank you.
So this is a little teaser for our audience today. On September 9th, we are looking towards really pulling together the nation and our focus on sustainable aviation fuels. There will be a virtual round table which will really get to some of the issues. We're going to try to talk with leading stakeholders in the industry to dig deeper into the barriers and what is going to take for us to overcome those barriers and get a true sustainable aviation fuel industry out there. So I wanted to just put this out there as a teaser for you. More information will be coming. If you can tune in or tune in later and find out what the stakeholders have to say, we would really appreciate that. But that's all I have to say for now. I think we are turning this back on over to Erik.
Erik Ringle:
Correct. Thank you.
Justin Rickard:
Thanks, Valerie. Can you hear me?
Erik Ringle:
Yes, Justin.
Justin Rickard:
So thank you Valerie and Zia. That was, I think, a great exploration of the benefits of sustainable aviation fuel. I did learn a few things today about this bioenergy technology and I hope the audience did too. Looks like we have some questions rolling in, so let's get started on those.
Okay first question and I'll let the two of you decide who should field it. How easy or hard is it to integrate sustainable aviation fuels into existing airport fueling infrastructure?
Zia Haq:
Sure. Thank you, Justin. I can take that. The pathways that we are working on are drop-in biofuel pathways, right? So by drop-in we mean that they literally are fungible with the existing petroleum stream. Petroleum-based Jet A. And so, they do have to go through an ASTM certification process, but once they do that then they can be blended at a certain level ranging from about 10% to 50% right now. And once that blending is done, there's some testing that goes on before and after the blending and so forth to make sure that all the properties are satisfied, but once all that is done it can go into the common hydrant system at airports and it's completely fungible. Those are the pathways that we're really working on right now. So airport fungibility, there are some issues with airport fungibility in terms of tanking, tanks, and pumps and so forth, but they're far easier than actually producing a fuel that would have to be unique.
Justin Rickard:
All right. Thank you.
Next question. In reference to slide 15, that was the path to commercialization slide, what are the biggest technical or economic risks of moving a new SAF technology from the lab to the market? What is BETO doing to try to address these?
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
So, yeah. Definitely. I'm happy to handle that.
The biggest challenges that SAF or any biofuel really has at this point really comes down to one thing and that's cost. Cost is a huge driver for this to be able to enter the market. And then with that comes the reduction of the risk. So let's talk a little bit about this in terms of history. We have tried to commercialize biofuels before as you're well aware. Our cellulosic ethanol activities in the early 2000s. And one of the things that really depended upon was people wanting to utilize this fuel because of the value that it brings and the value that biofuel brings is reduction in carbon emissions; that's one of the number one things. And at the time there was a discussion of price for carbon, value to carbon, but that never really materialized and so that market had to compete on its own merits and cost competitively with petroleum. And it began to look interesting when petroleum was 100, 150 dollars a barrel. However in 2014, that really dropped the price of petroleum due to a lot of other advanced technologies as well things that were going on simultaneously in the petroleum industry. And so, biomass lost its footing, lost its leverage to be able to compete in that market. So with that the tolerance for risk by our financial community ended up with the facilities that we were hoping to commercialize not materializing. But we learned a lot from that and I believe firmly that the sustainable aviation fuel market is driven by more than just dollars and cents. It is very important as I've said earlier, it's going to be difficult to compete head to head with petroleum, but there is a huge understanding of the dangers of carbon emissions. There's an outcry from the public, the customers. People want to reduce their carbon footprint and are even considering paying more for products that enable that. That is not a sustainable long-term business strategy, so as I've also said policies are going to be critical to enable biofuels long-term to compete in the market. But the customer wants this and it's driving our aviation industry to look really hard at this issue. They're investing in this issue. We're hearing from many, many stakeholders that they want to see this through to completion. So we'll keep doing our part in reducing the technology risk, the scale up, and risk associated with that. But we are looking to the markets to demand this. The policies to support it and the customers to buy it.
Justin Rickard:
Thank you, Valerie.
Next question. Where is SAF currently in use and where might it be adopted next?
Zia Haq:
Sure I can take a crack at that. Right now, we are seeing a considerable amount of interest in essentially the West Coast, you could say California starting with California of course and Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Mainly because of the low-carbon fuel standard and as you all may know, the Canadians are also considering a nationwide low-carbon fuel standard. I believe that's in the works, but if that should materialize then that would be another market for sustainable aviation fuels and other biofuels. There's also considerable discussion going on in Europe on how to reduce emissions from the aviation sector. So what that means is that flights flying into and out of Europe—including flights from the United States—would have to meet certain requirements for lower greenhouse gas emissions using biofuels. And so essentially, a lot of airlines are looking at the East Coast airports to see how they would use sustainable aviation fuels if they have to service European markets and meet GHG reduction requirements. So essentially, what's happening I think is that there are sort of these pockets of interest around the country and we are expecting these to grow over the coming years. A key element of that will be policy as Valerie alluded to. And depending on how that landscape develops, we'll have to stay tuned and see how the market develops. But right now those are the kinds of markets that we're seeing.
Justin Rickard:
Okay. Thank you, Zia. Let's see here... so how is SAF regulated? Is there some kind of certification process they must go through before being used in an airplane?
Zia Haq:
Sure. I can take a crack at that.
As I was sort of alluding to in my previous response, there is a certification process regulated by ASTM which is a U.S. regulatory agency body. And so, every single gallon of SAF, as well as jet fuel for that matter, has to be approved by ASTM. And currently there are seven approved pathways that have gone through the process and been approved at various levels from 10%–50% blends. There is some interest in looking at higher blend levels, so there's some initial discussion going on within the ASTM community and within FAA and other organizations to look at how one could bump up that to the 50% blend level. That's just started. But essentially, everything has to be approved by ASTM. And so, that's the regulatory barrier that everybody must meet. And the ASTM approval process is a long process and a time consuming process, but recently, in the last few years, they've made a lot of changes to that process to try to speed it up, to try to expedite it. Not to reduce the scientific rigor and the data that's needed to prove that the fields are safe, but just to make sure that the candidate technology of fuel can go through the process with as minimal amount of time as needed. And so, one of the latest approved pathways—which is the IHI technology—has been using that fast track approval process and has gone through that process and successfully. So under fast track, you basically say that you demonstrate the properties and as long as they meet some key requirements you're approved at up to a 10% level. So that's the approach that they've taken. So yes, there is a very rigorous process you'll be happy to know, because we're all flying public and we all want to be safe when we're flying that there is a very rigorous process and you really have to provide the data to ensure that the fields are safe through it.
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
I just want to add that I think that is one of the benefits of our scale-up program. By working within our scale-up program and being able to build pilot facilities and demo facilities we can produce enough fuel for those testings; those certifications and testings. Because that is a very big an important aspect of this.
Justin Rickard:
All right. Thank you both. Next question.
How will SAF impact current aviation jobs? Are some of the jobs transferable?
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
That is a really good question, because jobs are really a critical part of what we're trying to ensure with our work on bioenergy. So let's remember that SAF is a drop-in fuel. So in general, by replacing petroleum with sustainable aviation fuels, most of the aviation jobs aren't going to change. You're still going to have your pilots, your flight attendants, your ground crew all doing the important work that they do. Where the jobs will be impacted is in the biofuels production arena. As we said earlier, we believe that full development of this industry could lead to 1 million jobs. Some of these jobs will be transferable with the existing petroleum jobs, biorefineries, and petroleum refineries, while different, require some of the same capabilities. And so we're working closely with the industry - both sides - to make sure that there is a transition so that jobs are not lost but transitioned. But there will be new jobs. Particularly in the rural communities where the feedstocks will need to be grown, harvested, pre-processed. It can really benefit those industries as well as additional jobs in waste management where we'll be looking at whether it's biosolids from wastewater treatment facilities or wastes at landfills, we see an increase of potential jobs in that space as well. But very important to the job story is that if we're able to fully impact the aviation industry with sustainable aviation fuels we will be improving the quality of life of the people who work in that industry, because as we're beginning to understand the use of these fuels is having an impact on other pollutants like particulate matter and less aromatics and this can immediately impact the community surrounding the use of these fuels. And so, we're looking to that to make these jobs better, healthier, more desirable jobs for the industry that's already there.
Justin Rickard:
All right. Thank you. That was a great answer and you talked a little bit about the role component in your last answer there, but can one of you expand on the role rural America can play in advancing the aviation industry.
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Sure. Zia did a really good job of describing the Billion Ton Study we've done which is a look at what we can produce in this country as sustainable feedstocks. We hear a lot about land use and how to best use the land that we have and how it might impact indirectly land in other countries. And that Billion Ton Study is built upon ensuring the best quality use of the land that we have, not reducing but allowing for an increase in things like food, feed for animals, and even fiber for other industries. And so working with our agricultural communities to really pull off those technology developments that will enable the most productive agriculture land that we can have in this country is really important. We have begun a dialogue with USDA and we work with them closely all the time, but we've begun a dialogue around the concept of carbon smart agriculture or sustainable farming. These are advances that can take place with the existing industry that will help them have more productive soil, because they'll be considering the carbon in the soil and how the production of food and energy crops can work to improve that. It will be important. It's an important part of where we want to go with our overall life cycle assessment of technologies. One thing that we're very excited about is recent announcements by the ethanol industry; the starch-based ethanol industry to want to bring their carbon footprint down from where they are today which is already at about 40% reduction to 70% and even net zero production from corn. I assume the people that are naysayers to corn can't believe that's possible, but I do believe that's possible and we have analysis on a number of technologies that when implemented can actually accomplish this. So this is where I think the rural community can really benefit and hopefully will work closely with us to be able to improve, not only how they produce food, but how they produce bioenergy crops as well.
Justin Rickard:
All right. Thank you. Looks like we have a little over five minutes left. Let's keep rolling with these questions. I like this one about plastics.
Will DOE be open to drawing on non-renewable or non-recyclable plastics as a feedstock for fuels?
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
This is a very good question and we have been struggling with how we deal with plastics and, for that matter, CO2 from flue gas operations and really what is driving our motivation is CO2 reductions. So DOE has a whole program around plastics working with our Advanced Manufacturing Office where we're looking at taking waste plastics particularly since quite a bit of them cannot be recycled. It's not economic to recycle them, but we want to find ways to improve that situation. So we're looking at how we can degrade the plastics back to their chemical components and then look at that to develop higher value products or uses of that plastic that will change the recycling equation. And in addition of course, we're looking to bio-based plastics. Both to support the growing bioenergy industry but to improve the story for plastics. But eventually at some point in their life cycle those plastics will no longer be able to be recycled and to be able to use them in a fuel scenario which is considered right now one of the more lower uses for that recycled carbon is something that we want to understand. It doesn't fall currently in the definition of sustainable aviation fuel, but there are other definitions out there that are based on reduction in CO2 that may enable it to qualify. I think we need to understand all of the sustainability implications of these things so that we can move forward with appropriately getting these registered and certified. But the science is very interesting to us. I think the DOE has the capacity and the capability to look into that science and so I wouldn't suggest it's off the table.
Justin Rickard:
All right. Great answer. Let's see. I have to sift through these; a lot of questions today.
Do you know the role co-products play in the economics of biofuel production?
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Zia, want me to take that one?
Zia Haq:
Sure.
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Okay. I don't have all the data right in front of me, but one of the things that was really important in how we developed our renewable hydrocarbon strategy years ago was evaluating the value of all of the components of a barrel of oil. If we were going to displace just one of those—let's say gasoline, which was a major portion of the barrel—what would happen to the rest of the components? If we didn't want to import petroleum, we needed to have substitutions for those components and very quickly as the petroleum industry already realized, the major economic driver of an overall barrel of oil isn't the fuel components but it is the chemicals. The value of those chemicals really drives the economics within a petroleum refinery. And so, finding substitutions in the bioenergy world is the same. They help to drive the economics of the overall process. Now, some of the technologies we look at today can produce a number of products all at the same time. For example, a lot of the technologies that are looking at producing renewable diesel also produce sustainable aviation fuels and a component which can go to use in perhaps biopolymers. So our efforts are to look for those situations that make economic sense for the use of the carbon, but also have the biggest CO2 reduction potential for that carbon. So we've been working again with our colleagues at the Advanced Manufacturing Office to understand industrial decarbonization, how the chemicals industry plays into that, and where biomass can have a role. And there are some significant pathways for decarbonization around the use of biomass for some of the chemicals out there. So we are continuing our development effort in that space; partially as it supports fuels, but also as it supports its own decarbonization strategy.
Justin Rickard:
Awesome. We have a couple of questions on pyrolysis and biochar.
So what role do you see for pyrolysis for production of biofuel and its biochar co-product for carbon removal and sequestration?
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Zia, I'll give you a chance to answer another one?
Zia Haq:
Sure, yes. We are doing quite a lot of work on pyrolysis to see whether the fuel cuts that are produced from a pyrolysis process are suitable for aviation or marine and, right now, at least the thinking is that these the pyrolysis-based bio-oils might be better suited for marine applications for a variety of reasons. We're also looking at another option called hydrothermal liquefaction or HTL which is a slightly higher temperature and pressure operation than pyrolysis. And HTL, it turns out, might have more suitability for aviation fuels. So what I think we really need to do is look at all these different pathways and see where the products from these pathways fit into each market. Not everything may be suitable for aviation fuels, but if we have a pathway that produces both aviation plus, renewable diesel plus renewable gasoline, then that's a win-win for multiple markets. So that's how we're approaching it.
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Yes, and on the biochar story, biochar has always been a potential product coming out of these types of technologies. USDA has a bigger program looking at the benefits the pros and cons of use of biochar, but DOE also has an interest in this space. We have begun, under this new administration, a focus area on decarbonization of agriculture. And what that means to us is how does the biomass story play in ensuring that soil carbon sequestration is maximized? I've spoken a lot about the high quality soil and productivity for the farm. It directly relates to ensuring that what we're doing is providing soil that can produce crops that are viable but also have high source of carbon sequestration. Biochar plays a role in that. We're also looking at things like landscape design, how can you produce crops side by side with bioenergy feedstocks, prevent nutrient runoff into the water and actually have double the amount of productivity on the land? And we're looking at how biomass might help to bring land that is no longer viable back to life. For example, some of the mining lands in Appalachia could be sources of regeneration using biomass to bring the soil back to life. So there's a lot of things we're doing under that umbrella of decarbonization of agriculture and biochar is definitely one of those areas that we're investigating.
Justin Rickard:
All right. Thanks, Valerie and Zia.
It looks like we are just about out of time here. I want to be respectful of everybody's time. If you didn't get your question answered, you're welcome to send them to the eere_bioenergy@ee.doe.gov address shown at the top of this slide and BETO will do its best to get them answered. I'd like to thank Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed and Zia Haq of the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office for taking the time to speak to us today about the sustainable aviation fuel strategy at BETO. Within a few weeks this webinar recording and slides will be posted on the BETO webinars webpage at the hyperlink located on the bottom of the slide. All right, everybody, have a great rest of your day. Thank you very much.
Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed:
Thank you all.
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