Jet Fuels Made From Plants Could Compete With Fossil Fuels On Price

Anita - Mar 21, 2019

Scientists found that plant-based fuels production cost can be significantly reduced to potentially compete with petroleum fuels on price.

In the context of looming climate change, humans need to shift to use environmentally-friendly sustainable energy sources. And there is no industry that needs this as much as the energy-intensive aviation industry.

According to a new study by researchers from the Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Department, jet biofuels based on plants could provide a competitive substitute to fossil fuels.

Speaking about the study, Head of the study and a scientist from DOE’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies, Corinne Scown said it was challenging to electrify the aviation industry using fuel cells or batteries in part due to the restrictions of weight on airplane, therefore liquid biofuels potentially play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientist also added that the JBEI scientist team has been on the track of biological routes to “advanced bio-jet fuel blends” which originated from sugars made from plants as well as have attractive properties which could really offer an advantage over traditional jet fuels.

Multidisciplinary teams from JBEI are putting their efforts in optimizing each phase of the process of producing plant-based jet biofuel in order to obtain the highest productivity from bioconversion as possible. Scown and colleagues also took advantage of novel analysis methods to evaluate if they could achieve their purpose of making fuels made from plants competitive to ones made from petroleum.

Thanks to the JBEI’s efforts, the jet biofuels theoretical cost decreased to a mere US$16 each gallon. This cost was an astronomical US$300,000 when JBEI was founded. However, the scientists still have work to do to achieve their goal since the conventional jet fuel is only priced at US$2.50 each gallon.

190319083920 1 900x600 — *Scientists are making plant-based jet fuels*

The scientists took advantage of computer simulations to make a model of five paths which feature the essential technology and necessary following costs of scaled-up production to achieve the price’s goal. They figured out that all of these five paths could actually produce fuels made from plants at US$2.50/gallon rate.

It is known that the research is released in the Energy & Environmental Science journal.