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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Morenike Ajike Peters, Carine Tondo Alves, Jude Azubuike Onwudili
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-08-01
Series:Energies
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/16/6100
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1996-1073