How we are Investing in Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) and Electric Aircraft
What makes sense financially, economically and environmentally for Sustainable Airplane Fuels and for Electric Aircraft?
There is a lot of concern about on the effects of the aviation industry on the environment:
Some are concerned about carbon emissions - It has been estimated that the aviation industry is accounting for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions;
Some are concerned about using fossil fuels in aviation - rising costs, depleting resources etc. ,
There has considerable talk of relatively authoritarian approaches to address these concerns:
Prohibiting or limiting aviation travel through various mandates, lockdowns or restrictions;
Requiring carbon emissions taxes to be paid for aviation usage;
Setting up government-controlled Digital IDs and social credit scoring systems to monitor and restrict aviation usage, perhaps all implemented through the private sector, government-regulated retail and commercial banks.
Are there any approaches that can address the environmental concerns and challenges - without taking these authoritarian approaches or raising taxes? Yes!
Market Environmentalism
Our approach here at CedarOwl is to look to the four principles of Market Environmentalism for guidance:
1. Market Economy: Economic and environmental success are not mutually exclusive. Only the market economy’s dynamic nature incentivizes entrepreneurs to do “more with less” and to create innovations that limit our ecological footprint.
2. Private Property Rights: Property rights provide the incentives for both environmental sustainability and accountability. That which no one owns, no one cares for.
3. Decentralization: Decentralizing power from government bureaucracies to local communities fosters closer cooperation, resource management, and environmental accountability.
4. Optimism and Innovation: We must embrace optimism and the power of innovation to achieve real change. Humans are not a plague on the planet but rather the “ultimate resource,” capable of bringing forth innovative ideas and solutions to protect our environment. Environmental challenges can be solved through innovation, technological progress, and entrepreneurship—while rejecting alarmist and unscientific approaches.
Ok sounds good but what are the potential practical solutions for the aviation industry?
Let’s explore these solutions and how we are investing in this space.
Current Challenges
The solutions for coming up with Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) have the following challenges so far:
Scalability - meaning ability to produce sufficient quantities of SAF to meet global industry demands and trends;
Cost of Production and Operations - on average, alternative jet fuels cost 2.8 times more than their fossil-fuel counterparts as of 2023;
Pollution by-products which adversely affect the environment:
Release of toxic pesticides into the environment. Extensive pesticides are used in the large-scale agribusiness production of SAF-based materials - corn, sugar and other agricultural commodities;
Fuels from biological sources still have environmental impacts - the effects depend largely on the specific agricultural practices used to produce them. Clearing natural ecosystems to plant massive fields of single crops, for example, can on balance release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than those crops will ever capture. In the worst-case scenarios, some crop-based biofuels produce more emissions than fossil fuels.
Overall Profitability.
Each of the current solutions have one or more challenges in the above. However, through technological innovation based on a Market Environmentalism approach, we are confident that the challenges can be overcome.
Let’s look into a bit more detail on the solutions and current challenges.
Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs)
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is generally an alternative fuel made with non-petroleum feedstocks such as food and yard waste, used cooking oil, soybean oil and ethanol from corn. Although burning the finished fuel emits a similar amount of greenhouse gases as traditional petroleum-based fuels, carbon emissions over the SAF lifecycle can be significantly lower.
Here are some companies developing Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs):
Neste (Finland)
World Energy (Ireland)
Total Energies (France)
LanzaTech (US)
Fulcrum BioEnergy (US)
We like very much the approach and products of LanzaJet. Their technology makes jet fuel using alcohol, sourced from a variety of materials, including corn and sugarcane. The company’s process starts with ethanol and then pulls out water, strings molecules together into longer chains, and adds hydrogen. The result is a chemical mixture then further separated out into the components that can be burned as jet fuel.
LanzaJet opened the first commercial alcohol-to-jet-fuel factory in Georgia in January 2024 and has buyers secured for all the fuel produced at that facility through 2034. British Airways, one of LanzaJet’s investors, will be a customer.
LanzaJet’s fuels could cut the climate impacts from burning fuel roughly in half, though the exact amount will depend on the source of alcohol used. The company’s sugarcane-derived ethanol could cut emissions by between 54% and 66%,
The company plans to test out its new Georgia factory using corn-based fuels, though it’s only certified to sell sugarcane-based fuels in the US so far. LanzaJet is also partnering with its former owner, LanzaTech, to take materials like municipal solid waste and industrial waste gas and transform them into ethanol, which LanzaJet will then make into jet fuel. This pathway could result in jet fuel that’s 85% less polluting than fossil fuels, the company claims. - source link
Instead of SAFs, Why Not Consider Electric Aircraft?
Another technological innovation that can be brought to the aviation industry is instead of using Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs), why not develop a solid-state battery, leveraging material science innovation to enable aircraft to be fully electric. This approach would not only be advantageous from a carbon emissions reduction, but also advantageous from the perspective of not having the adverse environmental impacts of SAFs.
To this goal, the Solid-state Architecture Batteries for Enhanced Rechargeability and Safety (SABERS) initiative is currently working to develop a battery to usher in a new era of power storage for electric air travel. A joint venture between NASA, Georgia Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laborator, SABERS researchers have been using different materials and novel construction methods to develop a new kind of battery.
Ok these innovative approaches for the aviation industry sound good, so how are we investing in this space .. let’s delve in …