The Solution to SAF’s Most Looming Challenge: the HEFA Feedstock Ceiling
Dave Austgen
CEO
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BioVeritas
SAF is the most powerful lever available to us today to decarbonize aviation. That’s not new news.
The world needs ~120 billion gallons of SAF by 2050. That’s the prize that SAF producers have in their sights.
HEFA is the dominant SAF technology of the current and foreseeable future: 99% of current supply is HEFA. That’s well known.
The supply of current HEFA feedstocks is expected to hit a ceiling near 2030, limiting future growth. These conventional HEFA feedstocks – such as waste fats, oil, and greases (FOGs) – can support 6 billion gallons of SAF in 2030, while capacity from announced projects by that time will be 8 billion gallons. While there are a number of other SAF pathways being explored, including Alcohol-to-Jet (ATJ), Gasification Fischer-Tropsch (GFT), and Power-to-Liquid (PTL) -- in the absence of major technological breakthroughs they will be challenged to cost-effectively close the gap in the next decade. Again, this is familiar territory for those of us in the industry.
SAF is important and there’s a well-established dominant technology, HEFA, but it has one Achilles heel: feedstock constraints.
So what have we, as an industry, chosen to do?
We’ve taken the only technology that has produced actual commercial-scale SAF – SAF that’s being uplifted right now into commercial aircraft -- and have taken its feedstock ceiling to be largely a constant rather than a variable to be solved. While there is work underway with algae, cover crops, and oil-producing trees such as jatropha, those sources require substantial development to be ready for commercialization. In addition, the UK is planning to cap the amount of HEFA-based SAF starting in 2027 to stimulate progress on alternate SAF technologies.
Instead, the industry has spent tremendous collective energy – and money – creating increasingly complex alternate technologies, including the expensive (point-source CO2 capture to create power-to-liquid fuels), and the very long-term (direct air capture of CO2 with green hydrogen to produce SAF). While the industry will eventually need volume from multiple pathways to satisfy demand, the likelihood of these alternate technologies delivering meaningful volume at satisfactory prices in the near term is low. In the meantime, the demand for SAF is accelerating, feedstock constraints are looming, and the need to decarbonize is pressing. There simply aren’t decades to spare. Airlines, aviation fuel providers, corporate customers, and investors need commercially viable and scalable SAF solutions now. And there’s a tried-and-true technology – the only one that is actually producing SAF today – that can provide the answer, if only that Achilles’ heel could be addressed. Here’s the new news: it now can.
Enter BioVeritas. We solve the most looming constraint facing SAF: lack of feedstocks for HEFA. By alleviating this constraint we will unshackle SAF growth. We are SAF, unconstrained.
How we do this involves both the novel and the ordinary, which together form The BioVeritas ProcessTM for SAF.
The novel: BioVeritas takes biomass-based feedstocks -- ranging from starch and sugar to cellulosic agricultural residues, to purpose-grown feedstocks, food waste, forestry residues, and manure -- through Directed Mixed Culture Fermentation, an evolved version of anaerobic digestion, unlocking an entirely new slate of biomass sources. The volatile fatty acids (VFAs) that result from this fermentation are then extracted at high purity through an energy-efficient, low-carbon intensity process.
The ordinary: the extracted VFAs are then converted using a gas-phase catalytic process into ketones, a class of organic compounds with myriad industrial uses. Importantly, the ketones BioVeritas produces are a drop-in feedstock for HEFA SAF production and they are already in jet-fuel range in terms of carbon-chain length. This means they don’t need capital-intensive hydrocracking. Plus, the BioVeritas ProcessTM for SAF requires less than half the hydrogen as conventional HEFA processes. We are, in effect, creating a new stream of drop-in feedstocks ready to be directly fed into existing HEFA production processes.
The bottom line: BioVeritas is pioneering a process that can unlock a plentiful supply of biomass-based feedstock, including waste and residual cellulosic materials, for use by HEFA producers. By lifting feedstock constraints BioVeritas is lifting SAF production constraints. And that is the new news the industry has been waiting for.