Overview
The European Commission has legislated to mandate that 70% of aviation fuel uplifted within the EU must be “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” by 2050, with a series of incrementally building mandates starting with 2% by 2025. This presents an enormous challenge to the aviation industry as in 2022, just 0.05% of global aviation fuel was SAF. SAF supply must be scaled to meet these mandates. This will require technological development and deployment, but also the procuring of logistical and supply chain information to know what SAF feedstocks are available (i) in what quantities, (ii) where, (iii) when, and (iv) at what price. The importance of logistic structures, intermediates platforms and co-production scenarios to enhance techno-economic feasibility will be explored as well. Currently, across European but also in international jurisdictions, this information is not readily available. This void presents an initial obstacle to those wishing to conceive of SAF supply chains to support first of kind SAF production facilities in specific regional environments. This project will address the basic but essential logistical data that would provide the initial basis by which to conceive realistic and informed SAF supply chains, and SAF production technology scenarios, that may combine to produce SAF with a market competitive selling price, over the coming ten-year period in Ireland.
Project details
Research
The outputs of this research will include PHD students producing two first author peer-review papers demonstrating their findings. The first papers can be expected to be published before month 25 of the project. The second papers can be expected to be published before month 42 of the project. The project will conclude with the publication of the PhD thesis of each student, by month 48 of the project. In addition to the findings reported in these documents, the project will have produced two PhD graduate’s expert in the state-of-art of SAF production technologies and their techno-economics, and in the supply chain logistics essential to SAF deployment.
Duration
ALI members have provided funding for two full time PhD students, working over four years.
University leads
- Luuk Van der Wielen, Bernal Professor Biosystems Design & Engineering, University of Limerick
- Stephen Dooley, Associate Professor, TCD
Partners
Funded by
