The production of aviation fuels through sustainable processes without the use of fossil resources is the only way to decarbonize and make commercial aviation more sustainable.
Biomass is often used as the starting material for the production of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). However, this biomass often comes from industrial agriculture and uses food and feed crops such as corn, sugarcane, and oilseeds. This leads to competition with food production, which raises doubts about the sustainability of these processes.
As an alternative raw material, the conversion of wood (lignocellulose) into SAFs is therefore being intensively researched. In the most promising process route, the cellulose component is converted into ethanol via fermentation and fed into the established "alcohol to jet fuel" route. However, lignin, the main component, remains unused.
The planned project will demonstrate a novel process that enables the complete utilization of lignocellulose (cellulose + lignin).
The innovative key step for this process is the electrochemical conversion of cellulose and lignin-based intermediates (carboxylic acids and bio-oil). Another special feature of the process is that linear-branched and cycloalkanes are produced simultaneously, which increases the quality of the resulting SAF. Standard processes primarily produce linear alkanes that require subsequent refinement.
The proposed process has a significantly better sustainability profile than established processes because it uses only wood waste as a raw material, which can be fully utilized. A large portion of the energy input for the process can be generated from renewable electricity, as the central process step is operated electrochemically. Furthermore, the process can be directly implemented into established value chains for biomass utilization or SAF production, significantly reducing investment costs.
The goal of this project is to demonstrate the complete conversion of wood waste into SAF. To this end, a novel electrochemical process will be implemented in value chains of the biofuel industry.
To this end, the new process steps are designed so that they can be directly linked to known lignocellulose digestion methods. At the same time, the high-quality SAF composition can be used directly or adapted to different requirements with minimal changes in the reaction procedure.
The resulting SAF is of higher quality than fuels from comparable processes (due to the higher proportion of cycloalkanes).
