A Review of Current and Emerging Production Technologies for Biomass-Derived Sustainable Aviation Fuels

Morenike Ajike Peters, Carine Tondo Alves, Jude Azubuike Onwudili*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

Abstract

The aviation industry is a significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, with over 920 million tonnes per year, and there is a growing need to reduce its environmental impact. The production of biojet fuel from renewable biomass feedstocks presents a promising solution to address this challenge, with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels in the aviation sector. This review provides an in-depth discussion of current and emerging biojet fuel conversion technologies, their feasibility, and their sustainability, focusing on the promising conversion pathways: lipids-to-jet, sugar-to-jet, gas-to-jet, alcohol-to-jet, and whole biomass-to-jet. Each technology is discussed in terms of its associated feedstocks, important chemistries, and processing steps, with focus on recent innovations to improve yields of biojet product at the required specifications. In addition, the emerging power-to-liquid technology is briefly introduced. With the integrated biorefinery approach, consideration is given to biomass pretreatment to obtain specific feedstocks for the specific technology to obtain the final product, with the embedded environmental sustainability requirements. In addition, the review highlights the challenges associated with the biojet production technologies, with embedded suggestions of future research directions to advance the development of this important and fast-growing sustainable fuel industry.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6100
Number of pages40
JournalEnergies
Volume16
Issue number16
Early online date21 Aug 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2023

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Keywords

  • biojet fuel
  • conversion technologies
  • lignocellulosic biomass
  • lipid feedstock
  • sustainable aviation fuel

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