Sustainable Aviation Fuel News Roundup – September 2020

We are now moving into the 3rd quarter of 2020, and with it, a hope of a more ‘back to normal’ feel for people in the Sustainable Aviation Fuel, (“SAF”), business. It’s been a challenging year for global airlines and those industries that support it with projects that look toward a more sustainable future.

While recognizing some of these challenges, our team at Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels, LLC, (“NWABF”), knows that the SAF market is still a wildly exciting area to be working in. Every week, we’re reading about new policies being discussed, new projects coming to fruition, or new partnerships being formed.

There is a movement going on in SAF, and there’s a bright future ahead for creating SAF to support a more carbon emissions-free future for Airlines.

Let’s take a look at some of the recent newsworthy articles we’ve seen in this area and provide you with background information on NWABF’s take on these issues.

Creating New Markets for Woody Biomass

Creating new markets for the woody biomass in our country’s forests is the angle in the Biomass magazine opinion column from Robert Williams, an NJ-based certified forester. He sees a future for forestry managers to try to partner together with companies that can clean up the forests and utilize the woody biomass in key ways:

• wildfire prevention
• habitat restoration
• ecosystem restoration

Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels efforts to create a production facility to convert woody biomass into SAF will be part of the solution described above.

Our system will convert forest residues, mill residues in forests, and the logging debris that is left in forests after a harvest (also known as ‘slash’).

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Is Aviation BioFuels Ready for Take-Off?

Bio-Fuels International covers recent statistics in a new article “Is aviation biofuels ready for take-off?” The article mentions that the aviation industry is committed to cut carbon emissions in half by 2050, from an earlier 2005 level. To meet this goal, it is essential to blend lower carbon SAF with fossil jet fuel. Thus, SAF is key to reducing aviation’s carbon emissions.

This is what Northwest Advanced has been pushing for a long time – the need for an airline to see the future is with us. That’s why Delta Airlines got behind our project with a $2 million investment last year that propelled our project forward.

We have been very active behind the scenes this summer, and we’re excited about the future of SAF.
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The Long Haul to Getting Aviation Biofuel off the Ground

An article in Reuters Events describes the critical steps to overcome and the challenges to face before SAF can move into the next generation phase that is eagerly anticipated.
To make a successful journey, every development and production step needs to be addressed in the right way. One of the challenges is moving from the lab to the production facility to a commercial scale. The challenges exist, however. As one of the executives mentions in a quote “If you can’t sell the product, why would investors build the plant? And if you don’t have an off-take for the fuel, you can’t get investment.”

These are very real challenges that NWABF took great pains to address in the past year, and we succeeded along the way. NWABF developed a 4 Pillars Strategy that we feel is the formula for successfully moving a Project forward.