Can farm and food waste power tomorrow’s airplanes?

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https://www.science.org/content/article/can-farm-and-food-waste-power-tomorrow-s-airplanes

By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: It’s a painful truth for people who fly: ...Air travel is among the most carbon-polluting human activities. A round trip from New York City to London emits nearly 1000 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) per passenger.... Annually, airplanes spew some 920 million tons of CO2, accounting for roughly 3.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Derek Vardon is hoping a yellowish, foul-smelling liquid will help change that. The fluid is a collection of short, chainlike molecules called volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from decaying food waste, .... In a process he and colleagues developed, the VFAs are vaporized, then ...knit the VFAs into longer chains called ketones. ...the ketones are piped to another reactor ...to make kerosene, aka jet fuel. Vardon, a chemist who spent most of the past decade at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is betting this food-to-fuel process and others that convert different forms of waste “biomass” into fuel represent the future of air travel, and the world’s best hope for dramatically reducing  the  greenhouse gases it generates. In March 2021, he and his colleagues detailed the technology in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with calculations revealing the resulting jet fuel could be nearly as cheap as the petroleum-based version. ...the net emissions from bio-based jet fuel would only be a fraction of those from fossil fuel. In October 2021, Vardon bet on his technology, leaving NREL to become chief technical officer of Alder Fuels, a startup aiming to produce sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). ...In fall 2021, United Airlines committed to buying 5.7 billion liters of SAFs from Alder, the largest such aviation deal at that time. ...More than a dozen SAF startups have formed in recent years in the United States, China, Japan, Singapore, India, Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Canada. ...For now, SAF producers create just 100 million liters of fuel per year for an industry that consumed more than 360 billion liters in 2019.... By 2030, the market for SAFs may grow by 70-fold, to nearly $15.7 billion, according to Markets and Markets.…

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