{"id":130630,"date":"2023-08-22T07:12:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-22T05:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=130630"},"modified":"2023-08-17T08:45:52","modified_gmt":"2023-08-17T06:45:52","slug":"is-recycling-co2-into-jet-fuel-the-holy-grail-for-sustainable-aviation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/is-recycling-co2-into-jet-fuel-the-holy-grail-for-sustainable-aviation\/","title":{"rendered":"Is recycling CO2 into jet fuel the Holy Grail for sustainable aviation?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Carved out by glacial floodwaters that swept across the Columbia Plateau during the Pleistocene era, it\u2019s a place that intimately knows change \u2013 climate, social and economic. What once was a barren landscape of arid steppe and canyon, beloved only by its inland Salish tribe, the Sinkiuse, its  waterways were damned, irrigation was developed and an airbase was created in the mid 20th<\/sup>century \u2013 acts that turned it into the transportation tech and recreation hub it is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Named for tribal Chief Moses who attended Mission school, learnt \u201cthe ways of the whites\u201d but never converted to Christianity, spoke five languages and, eventually, negotiated the Sinkiuse surrender of the land in an attempt to save himself and them, Moses Lake\u2019s biblical association with the miraculous parting of water and saviourhood is perhaps a lucky coincidence for one of the tech startups making a home there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1.<\/strong> Twelve<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

On the site of a former Moses Lake sugar beet mill,\u00a0Twelve<\/a>, co-founded by three Stanford University brains, has just broken ground on a facility that by 2024 aims to be up and performing the apparent miracle of turning CO2<\/sub>\u00a0into aviation fuel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By splitting water molecules and carbon dioxide molecules, mixing the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen into \u201csyngas\u201d, then processing them using the Fischer-Tropsch method, they will create a liquid that is chemically identical to jet fuel extracted from fossils. The process was successfully tested in 2021 in partnership with the US Airforce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A vial of Twelve\u2019s synthetic fuel \u00a9Twelve<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

2.<\/strong> Holy Grail?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Aviation was to blame for 2% of the world\u2019s energy-related CO2<\/sub> emissions in 2022, a worse sinner than roads, rail, or shipping, according to the International Energy Agency. The pressure to decarbonise flying is intense but has not yet resulted in a solution that comes anywhere near the quantities of sustainable fuel needed. The major US airlines alone consumed 17.5 billion gallons of jet fuel in 2022. For comparison, Twelve is expecting to produce only an estimated 40,000 gallons of fuel per year at first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with million-dollar deals already on the table with Alaska Airlines, Microsoft and Shopify, the startup is looking to ramp up to ten times that within the first year of operation, Ram Ramprasad, the company\u2019s chief commercial officer, has told Canary Media. \u201cThis is just our first step,\u201d he said. \u201cPart of our scale-up plan is to repeat this very quickly and build much bigger facilities\u2026 up and down the middle of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So has Twelve now hit upon the Holy Grail? A potentially scalable SAF or E-Jet product that is\u00a0not reliant<\/em>\u00a0on scarce feedstocks like animal fats and cooking oil, and even recycles the very CO2<\/sub> emissions that are contributing to global warming? It seems too good to be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Twelve\u2019s electrochemical reactor uses catalysts to transform CO2<\/sub>\u00a0into jet fuel \u00a9Twelve<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

3. Too good to be true?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Questions have to be asked about where Twelve will get its raw materials \u2013 and how sustainable its supply and delivery chain will be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electricity for the Moses Lake facility will be taken from Washington\u2019s grid, which is over two-thirds hydropowered, the rest driven by fossil gas, renewables, nuclear \u2013 and coal. Transportation of SAF batches to airports will be done at first by road, only switching to rail when production is at a higher output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For CO2,<\/sub>\u00a0initially the company will be supplied from an Oregon ethanol refinery, later switching to pulp and paper facilities in home state Washington, Ramprasad has said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Irony <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, as our devices, homes and vehicles become increasingly driven by battery and the world\u2019s industries and energy suppliers seek to reduce CO2 <\/sub>emissions, Twelve will have to deal with increasing competition for its raw ingredients: hydrogen and the (renewable) electricity needed to create it; and CO2,<\/sub>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b\u201cDirect air capture\u201d CO2<\/sub>, sucked mechanically out of the sky is at present energy-guzzling, costly and untested at scale, so Twelve will indeed need to look to up, down and middle of the country to the U.S. Corn Belt, where wind farms and\u00a0CO2<\/sub>-producing ethanol plants are plentiful\u2026at least for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, its disciples are plentiful too. The company has raised over $200 million venture capital in eight years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carved out by glacial floodwaters that swept across the Columbia Plateau during the Pleistocene era, it\u2019s a place that intimately knows change \u2013 climate, social and economic. What once was a barren landscape of arid steppe and canyon, beloved only by its inland Salish tribe, the Sinkiuse, its  waterways were damned, irrigation was developed and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"Moses Lake, Washington is a small, pleasant city in the USA\u2019s northwest, along a sinuous, managed body of water that from above resembles a dragon chasing an eagle","footnotes":""},"categories":[5571],"tags":[19659,19340,22582,10617,16792,12450,10743],"supplier":[967,18767],"class_list":["post-130630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-co2-based","tag-convertco2","tag-decarbonisation","tag-fossilfuelfree","tag-jetfuel","tag-saf","tag-syngas","tag-useco2","supplier-international-energy-agency-iea","supplier-twelve-formerly-opus12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130630\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130630"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=130630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}