By Scott Hamilton

Nov. 8, 2024, © Leeham News: The commercial aviation industry thinks Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is the best alternative energy to pursue to meet the lofty goal of achieving Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Plenty of people are skeptical, both of SAF being the best answer and of achieving the 2050 target date.

But a development company called CleanJoule is betting big on SAF’s future. Within the next few months, it plans to open a major production facility in Utah.

The company’s financial backers include Frontier, Wizz, and Volaris airlines, and their major investor, and Indigo Partners. Lufthansa Airlines and  several US government agencies collaborate with Clean Joule.

Mukund Karanjikar

Clean Joule was founded in 2009. Its co-founder and CEO, Mukund Karanjikar, said that much of the last 15 years has been devoted to raising funds for its research and development.

The period has also been about technology de-risking, advancing what is called the technology readiness level (TRL) as you go from concept to demonstrating it in an industrial environment.

“This is where we are,” Karanjikar said in a recent interview with LNA. “We are setting up our first industrial demonstration plant, which will go into production [soon]. The pilot plant has been in production for…almost 18 months.”

Emerging from stealth mode

Why 18 months?

“The objective…has always been it has to make technological and economic sense to us before we seek private investment,” Karanjikar said. “We never sought private investment so that we can make technological and economic sense of what we do. Once we knew the mass balance works, which means what goes in, what comes out, and it has economic underpinning, that’s when we raise private funding slightly north of $50m so that we can do the first of a kind industrial demonstration scale plant as we move towards our commercialization target.”

As is commonly discussed, Karanjikar said that SAF is viewed as a direct replacement of petroleum-derived Jet A. Jet A is incredibly efficient but is not good for the environment. But SAF, essentially in its infancy even though it’s been around for decades, is very expensive to produce and buy. The lack of production facilities and feedstock makes affordable SAF hard to come by.

“Ultimately SAF manufacturing has to make economic sense as well for mass adoption,” the CEO said.

Clean Joule intends to be one of the companies that make this leap.

“We are not talking about being a boutique player. Our target from the very beginning always was 100% SAF. What that means is if you look at the current SAF pathways, there are eight or so that have been approved.”

SAF limitations

Some are limited to 10%, others are limited to 50% of blendability. “Our innovation from 2009 exclusively focuses on how we can overcome that or transverse that SAF blend wall at 50%. This requires developing products and materials that actually allow you to get that 100% SAF mark. It’s a fundamentally different approach compared with what other people have been able to do, but then be stopped at 50% blend,” Karanjikar said.

Across the globe, 100bn gallons of jet fuel are sold today.

“There is a study called the USDA DOE Billion Ton Study, which says that the latest version of that study says, and these are government numbers, 1.3bn metric tons of biomass that’s available to be harvested sustainably. This will essentially produce somewhere between 70 to 80bn gallons just in America. Then you have a number of countries that are close to Ecuador, which have a lot more sunlight and they can grow a lot many different biomass feedstocks with a lot higher volume than we do. Yes, we are blessed as a country with a lot of land mass, but there are many other countries that have what you would call marginal lands, which would then grow some of those crops that become what’s called energy crops,” he said.

“The prevailing narrative as perpetrated by the oil and gas industry has been, ‘where are we going to get the biomass? The whole world is going to look like Houston, Texas. It’s going to an asphalt forest.’ That’s actually not true.”

Karanjikar said that just three or four states in the US Midwest, current biomass, if harvested, could yield 300m tons.

Focus on cost-effectiveness

“We are looking at exclusively from biomass and largely because our focus is on cost effectiveness, getting to the number on feedstock as a direct line of sight, and how it has been practiced by the industry,” he said. “Take a look at pulp and paper industry, other forest bioproducts industries, and animal feed industries, they know how to handle biomass at scale. On e-fuels, if you use point source capture, which means a power plant, the plume stack or a refinery plume stack where it’s highly concentrated carbon dioxide. To some degree, it makes sense.

“If you assume electricity, it’s two cents a kilowatt hour or lower in price. Then there is actually a path to commercialization. With direct air capture, the entrepreneurs have not yet been able to demonstrate cost effective direct air capture of carbon dioxide in order to then use the hydrogen that comes from green electricity to build molecules. Our focus is biomass-derived sustainable aviation fuel, essentially hydrocarbons that are superior than Jet A. That gives you the economic feasibility,” Karanjikar said.

Of course, Clean Joule isn’t the only company pursuing biomass and SAF production. Biomass Magazine is filled with news about companies pursuing this sector, including the petroleum company Marathon.