Alternative Jet Fuel Sustainability (Project 47)

Alternative jet fuels offer a number of potential benefits inluding:
(*) the potential to mitigate the net environmental impacts of emissions related to aviation
(*) energy supply diversification
(*) reduction in the economic impact due to oil price volatility
(*) U.S. energy security enhancement

As a result, alternative fuels are receiving considerable attention from government, industry and academia.

To evaluate the potential of various alternative jet fuels, a consistent set of metrics should be used, capturing the fuels' impact on, for example, climate change, air quality, water and land usage, and production costs. The broad Project 47 objective is to evaluate and compare potential alternative aviation fuels in terms of overall environmental and economic sustainability. Pathways and fuels include synthetic liquid fuels manufactured from coal, biomass, or natural gas; hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids from renewable oils including those from algae; and advanced techniques of converting sugars and alcohols to jet fuel. To properly account for the environmental costs and benefits, we need to evaluate alternative fuels' impact on on a lifecycle basis, ranging from obtaining feedstock (referred to as the "well," analagous to a water or oil well) to when the combustion products are exhausted into and react to the environment (referred to as the "wake").

This work expands upon PARTNER Project 28, which resulted in a report on life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of alternative jet fuels and several journal articles on different metrics and pathways; and PARTNER Project 17, which resulted in a PARTNER-RAND alternative fuels report on the economic and policy aspects of adopting alternative jet fuels. Currently, the research is being done in collaboration with investigators from Projects 3, 20, 30, and 45. The main strategic thrust of the research is to extend the sustainability assessment started under Project 28 to additional technology sets and feedstock options, to develop scenarios for biofuel deployment, and to conduct tradeoff analyses among different metrics and options. The results of this work are relevant to the NextGen environmental and energy goals relating to the development of alternative jet fuels, and offer important information to regulators, fuel producers and fuel procuring agencies as to the overall sustainability of different feedstock and technology options.
Anticipated outcomes

Research and publications evaluating alternative jet fuels in terms of overall environmental and economic sustainability, including:

(*) life-cycle greenhouse gas and cost of production analyses for feedstock to jet fuel pathways, including emerging technologies such as sugar to jet and algae oil to jet
(*) development and assessment of short-run and long-run alternative fuels scenarios
(*) investigation of impact of alternative jet fuels on air quality
(*) analyses on biofuel-induced changes in local climate due to alterations in surface characteristics
(*) impact assessment of increasing scale and maturity of biofuel production on environmental and economic metrics
(*) tradeoff analyses among different sustainability metrics and feedstock uses