Garbage to fuel aviation of future? Researchers show way for sustainable skies

The aviation industry has long been a major emitter of carbon dioxide. In the United States, the aviation industry uses around 22 billion gallons of jet fuel. It produces about onebillion tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is a whopping threeper cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.

But now a team of researchers from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found that if waste-to-fuel refineries were built near major travel hubs, the US could produce 3–5 billion gallons of Sustainable Aviation Fuel from waste every year.

This, the researchers say, could replace 15 to 25 per cent of the country's annual supply of jet fuel.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

Also watch |Countries agree to set interim goal to reduce emissions by 2030

"We have identified places in the United States where large airports are close enough to major waste-producing centres where you could build these SAF refineries right now," said Timothy Seiple, a computational scientist at PNNL and lead author on the paper, which was published in summer 2023 in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

What are the barriers?

Researchers are still studying how the technology could be scaled and still be cost-effective.

A major barrier to producing a decent amount of Sustainable Aviation Fuelis the amount of thesupply of waste itself, known as feedstock.

Secondly, the concern remains if the transportation of Sustainable Aviation Fuel would cancel out the carbon saved in the waste-to-fuel process.

"If cities build waste-to-fuel facilities closer to major airports, it's less likely that additional infrastructure will be needed to get SAF to airports," Karthikeyan Ramasamy, chief chemical engineer at PNNL and co-author on the paper, said. Moreover, "recycling garbage into fuel means that that garbage won't be trucked miles away to landfills and won't decompose, which releases methane," he added.