Reactors for Sustainable Aviation Fuel

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is a hot topic at the moment.  The blog title image shows a Turkish Airlines airplane in the livery highlighting the Aviation industry’s transition to bio fuels. Amar has seen an increasing interest in this area from our end customers and we thought it would be great to blog on this area important to all of us!

In the fight against global warming, decarbonization is a major target. Vehicular CO2 emissions are a major target to cut down on.  Batteries, green Hydrogen and renewable power are important parts of the strategy to decarbonize land-based cars, trucks and trains. Even for marine shipping methanol and ammonia have been offered as solutions (we will blog Amar’s relations with these areas in a future post). However the difficult sector to decarbonize has been aviation. Neither Hydrogen nor batteries have an energy density at the moment to make them viable for commercial aviation. For the short to mid term future liquid fuels seem the only feasible option to decarbonize aviation. 

Many of the SAF routes involve experimentation and pilot plants are a key component. Our customers at Amar include corporates, universities and research labs from all over the world! Do reach out for any of your SAF related needs. Email us.

The main interest we see has been in the following areas:

1. HEFA (Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids): The most established and widely used process, HEFA uses vegetable oils, waste fats, and greases to produce SAF


2. Fischer Tropsch Synthesis (FTS): This process involves converting syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide) derived from biomass, municipal waste or other sources into liquid hydrocarbons. See overall reaction below.
   


3. Alcohol-to-Jet (AtJ): In this route, ethanol or isobutanol, typically derived from biomass or waste, is converted into jet fuel.


4. Power-to-Liquid (PtL): Also known as e-SAF, this method converts renewable electricity into SAF by synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and green H2. See scheme below:
   


5. Methanol-to-Olefins (M2O): The olefins can then be polymerized to pricesely those components required for jet fuels. 

There are several other routes that we will blog about in future posts. But the summary is that this is an active area of ongoing research and the winner is not yet out. Extensive pilot plant runs will be required to find out the technical viability of various options. And there’s an opportunity for us at Amar and also various other Pilot Plant vendors.

Amar has been shipping many SAF related reactors and pilot plants to our customers. Tennasine our excellent dealers in Brazil are a great partner. Below is the photo of the recent SAF equipment we have shipped to Brazil.

We are always amazed by how geographical distance is no longer a factor in the modern process equipment industry: Brazil is literally as far away from India as possible in terms of shipping distance. Quality and price trumps any concerns about language or shipping costs. We regularly have test engineers from Tennasine visit our site in Mumbai for FAT trials.

We are truly global now!