Atlantic Biomass announces dual pathway for affordable SAF production
US-based proprietary enzymatic-based biomass company Atlantic Biomass said it has developed a dual pathway for affordable sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production.
“Converting stems and leaves from sustainable biomass into high-energy liquid fuels is not easy,” says Atlantic Biomass president Bob Kozak. “And right now it’s expensive.”
To solve this problem, the company alongside its partners the Ohio State University and Hood College, with funding assistance from Phase I of the Department of Energy Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programme and the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute (MEII), took apart the whole biomass-to-biofuel system to find an affordable way forward.
“We started by testing each process. Found out the limits and hidden benefits. It was hard work,” Kozak continued. “Instead of focusing on individual steps, we decided to look at biofuel production as a complex system that needed to be understood,” Kozak pointed out. “We looked for feedback loops and possibilities for multiprocessing. We found some that would lower costs and we put it all back together in a simplified Dual Pathway system.”
The company said its integrated biomass-ethanol-SAF process can simultaneously be used to produce a high purity SAF syngas feedstock. This creates a Dual Pathway system that can nearly double biomass to SAF yields from about 42% to 79% without adding biomass cleaning, syngas scrubbing, or other processing costs.
The US Department of Energy’s 2023 Billion Ton Report shows that just in the US, perennial grasses have the potential to produce 284-535m tonnes per annum of biofuel biomass ready for processing.
By partnering with existing ethanol and syngas based SAF installations, Atlantic Biomass said its system would be able to produce over 1m barrels per day of affordable and sustainable renewable jet fuel.
“That would be just about enough to fuel every US commercial and freighter flight with US produced renewables. Think what a difference that could make,” said Kozak.
In addition, portable versions of the Dual Pathway system can be forward deployed to key indigenous grass growing regions worldwide to produce ethanol and syngas to feed into European or Asian SAF production facilities.
The combination of the ethanol-to-SAF and syngas-to-SAF pathways in one system offers the cost-saving economics of vertical integration.