USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack frequently mentions the growth potential for SAF. He says the industry can expect a 35-billion-gallon demand. But a Los Angeles Times article today notes several hurdles for the fledgling industry. While airlines say recycled grease could help end emissions by 2050, they ask, “Is there enough?” Earlier this month, the article notes, “a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington made a bit of aviation history, completing a 600-mile trip that the airline hopes will prove the first leg of a journey to a greener future.”
Reaching the goal of eliminating aviation emissions — responsible for 3% to 4% of the world’s carbon emissions — won’t be easy. Some reasons, according to the article:
- It will take huge government investments via tax breaks or grants and ground-breaking technological advances, such as hybrid or all-electric jet planes — some experts envision making the switch to such technology sometime in the 2030s.
- Airlines currently have to pay up to four times as much for low-emission SAF as they pay for conventional fuel, which could mean higher airfares for everyone.
- The world’s refineries now produce about 26.4 million gallons of low-emission, sustainable aviation fuel a year. That is only a fraction of the 18.3 billion gallons of fuel burned by U.S. carriers alone in 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
- A proposal in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan calls for a fuel tax credit that could boost production of SAF to 3 billion gallons a year by 2030 — still a fraction of the fuel that airlines expect to need over the next decade.
For now, biofuel producers are relying on used cooking oil, rendered animal fat, the jatropha plant, algae and other so-called feedstock, but experts say refineries do not have access to enough of those materials to produce the billions of gallons of aviation fuel needed to reach the net-zero goal. About 3 billion gallons of used cooking oil is collected annually from the nation’s hotels and restaurants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but a lot of oil ends up in landfills or in sewers. It takes about eight gallons of used cooking oil to make one gallon of sustainable aviation fuel, industry experts say. That means that even if every drop of cooking oil were collected and turned into jet fuel today, it still wouldn’t be enough to fuel all current flights.
