Sustainable Aviation
What is SAF in term of renewable energy?
SAF stand for “Sustainable Aviation Fuel,” which is a type of renewable energy that is used in the aviation industry.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel is a type of biofuel that is made from sustainable sources such as agricultural and forestry waste, non-edible crops, and municipal waste. The fuel can be used in existing aircraft engines without the need for any modification, making it an attractive alternative to traditional fossil fuels. SAF can reduce the carbon emissions associated with air travel by up to 80% compared to traditional jet fuel.
SAF is gaining increasing attention as a way to help the aviation industry reduce its carbon footprint and meet climate targets. Several airlines and aircraft manufacturers have already started using SAF as part of their sustainability efforts.
Type of sustainable aviation fuel
There are several types of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) that can be used in the aviation industry.
Here are a few examples:
Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA)
This is one of the most commonly used types of SAF. It is made by converting plant oils and animal fats into jet fuel through a refining process called hydroprocessing.
Fischer-Tropsch (FT) fuels
These fuels are made by converting biomass or natural gas into a synthetic liquid hydrocarbon. FT fuels have a high energy density and can be blended with traditional jet fuel in varying amounts.
Alcohol-to-Jet (ATJ)
This type of SAF is made by converting sugars from non-food biomass, such as wood chips or agricultural waste, into alcohols. The alcohols are then converted into jet fuel through a refining process.
Bio-methane
This type of SAF is made by capturing and refining methane gas produced from agricultural waste, landfills, and other organic waste sources.
Power-to-Liquid (PtL)
This type of SAF is made by using renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar power, to produce hydrogen gas through electrolysis. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce a liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
These and other types of SAF are being developed and tested by companies and organizations around the world as part of efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of air travel.
Latest development of sustainable aviation fuel
There have been several recent developments in Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) that are worth noting:
Increased production
There has been a significant increase in SAF production capacity in recent years, with several new production facilities being built or planned around the world. This is helping to bring down the cost of SAF and increase its availability to airlines.
New feedstocks
Researchers are exploring new feedstocks for SAF, such as algae, which can be grown using wastewater and carbon dioxide. This could provide a more sustainable source of fuel than traditional biofuels.
Government support
Many governments around the world are providing financial incentives and regulatory support to encourage the production and use of SAF. For example, the European Union has set a target for SAF to make up 5% of jet fuel consumption by 2030.
Airlines commitment
Major airlines have made commitments to increase their use of SAF in the coming years. For example, United Airlines has pledged to purchase 1.5 billion gallons of SAF over the next 20 years, while Delta Air Lines has committed to replacing 10% of its jet fuel with SAF by 2030.
New partnerships
There have been several new partnerships between airlines, fuel producers, and other organizations to accelerate the development and adoption of SAF. For example, United Airlines has partnered with several SAF producers to help bring their fuels to market, while Boeing has partnered with a fuel cell manufacturer to develop an electric propulsion system for aircraft.
Latest Technology of sustainable aviation fuel
There are several emerging technologies that are being developed to produce Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) more efficiently and sustainably.
Here are a few examples Latest Technology of sustainable aviation fuel
Waste-to-fuel
Researchers are exploring new ways to convert waste products into SAF. For example, a company called LanzaJet is using a process called gasification to convert agricultural waste into a type of SAF called Alcohol-to-Jet (ATJ) fuel.
Synthetic biology
Synthetic biology is a field of science that involves designing and engineering biological systems for specific applications. Researchers are using synthetic biology to create microorganisms that can produce SAF more efficiently and sustainably than traditional methods.
For example, a company called Synhelion is using synthetic biology to create microorganisms that can convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into SAF.
Renewable electricity
Another emerging technology for producing SAF is using renewable electricity to power the production process.
For example, a company called ZeroAvia is developing a process to produce SAF using renewable hydrogen generated from wind and solar power.\
Carbon capture and utilization
Carbon capture and utilization involves capturing carbon dioxide emissions and using them as a feedstock for the production of SAF.
This can help reduce the carbon footprint of the SAF production process. For example, a company called Carbon Clean Solutions is using carbon capture technology to produce SAF from carbon dioxide emissions.
Direct air capture: Direct air capture involves capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air and using it as a feedstock for the production of SAF. This technology is still in the early stages of development, but it has the potential to provide a truly sustainable source of SAF.
World largest sustainable aviation fuel Country
The United States is currently the largest producer and consumer of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in the world, with several large-scale production facilities in operation and more under construction or planned. The country is home to many of the world’s leading SAF producers and has a strong commitment to developing and promoting the use of renewable energy in the aviation sector.
The US government has provided regulatory support and financial incentives to promote the production and use of SAF, including tax credits, grants, and loan guarantees for SAF producers. Additionally, several US airlines have made commitments to increase their use of SAF in the coming years, including United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and JetBlue.
Other countries, such as the European Union, Canada, and Brazil, are also investing in SAF production and use, and are expected to increase their SAF production capacity in the coming years. The European Union, for example, has set a target for SAF to make up 5% of jet fuel consumption by 2030. However, the US currently leads the world in terms of SAF production and consumption.
Country with the highest sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) use
Several countries around the world have started using Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in commercial aviation, including:
United States: The United States is currently the largest producer and consumer of SAF in the world, with several airlines using SAF in their operations.
Norway: Norwegian airline, Avinor, has committed to using 1% SAF in all its refueling at Oslo Airport, making it the first airport in the world to offer regular supply of SAF to airlines.
Netherlands: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has been using SAF since 2011 and aims to increase its use to 14% by 2030.
Finland: Finnair has been using SAF since 2019, with a target to use 10% SAF by 2025.
France: Air France has been using SAF since 2020, with a goal of using 2% SAF by 2025 and 5% by 2030.
Germany: Lufthansa Group has been using SAF since 2019 and aims to increase its use to 10% by 2025.
Canada: Air Canada has started using SAF in its flights from Vancouver to Montreal and plans to gradually increase its use in other flights.
These are just a few examples of countries that have started using SAF, and many other countries are also investing in SAF production and use.
Benefit for sustainable aviation fuel
There are several benefits associated with the use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF):
Reduced carbon emissions
SAF can reduce carbon emissions from aviation by up to 80% compared to conventional jet fuel. This can help reduce the carbon footprint of the aviation industry, which is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Improved air quality
SAF can also help improve air quality around airports by reducing emissions of pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. This can help reduce the health impacts of air pollution on nearby communities.
Energy security
SAF can help increase energy security by providing a domestically produced and renewable source of fuel for the aviation industry. This can help reduce dependence on imported oil and enhance energy independence.
Job creation
The development and production of SAF can also create jobs in the renewable energy sector, as well as in industries that support the production and distribution of SAF, such as logistics and transportation.
Innovation and technology development
The development of SAF requires innovation and the use of new technologies, which can drive advances in science and technology and spur economic growth.
Reputation and corporate social responsibility
The use of SAF can help enhance the reputation of airlines and other organizations in the aviation industry by demonstrating a commitment to sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in the Airlines
Several airlines around the world have started using Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in their operations, including:
United Airlines
United Airlines has been a leader in SAF use and has made a commitment to use 100 million gallons of SAF by 2030. The airline has used SAF on several flights, including a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2016, which was the first commercial flight using SAF in the US.
Delta Air Lines
Delta Air Lines has committed to using 10% SAF by 2030 and has used SAF on over 1,000 flights since 2016.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
KLM has been using SAF since 2011 and aims to use 14% SAF by 2030.
Scandinavian Airlines(SAS)
Cathay Pacific
Cathay Pacific has used SAF on select flights and plans to use SAF on all flights departing from Hong Kong.
Qantas
Qantas has used SAF on select flights and has committed to using 50% SAF on all flights departing from Los Angeles by 2026.
JetBlue
British Airways has conducted flights using SAF and is committed to using SAF in the future. To be sustainable airlines in 2019, they announced a deal with SAF producer Velocys to supply sustainable fuel
These are just a few examples of airlines that have started using SAF, and many other airlines are also investing in SAF production and use.
Future of sustainable aviation fuel
The future of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is promising as the aviation industry seeks to reduce its carbon footprint and achieve carbon neutrality.
Here are some of the key developments and trends that are shaping the future of SAF:
Increased production
As demand for SAF grows, production is expected to increase. Several new SAF production facilities are under construction or in the planning stages, which will increase the availability and affordability of SAF.
Technological advancements
Advances in technology are making it easier and more cost-effective to produce SAF. New feedstocks and production processes are being developed that will make SAF more sustainable and economically viable.
Government support
Many governments around the world are supporting the development and use of SAF through policies and incentives. This includes tax credits, subsidies, and mandates for SAF use, which can help accelerate the adoption of SAF.
Partnerships and collaborations
Airlines, fuel producers, and other stakeholders in the aviation industry are forming partnerships and collaborations to accelerate the development and adoption of SAF. This includes collaborations on research and development, production, and distribution.
Innovation and experimentation
The aviation industry is exploring new ways to produce SAF, including through the use of waste and carbon capture technologies. This experimentation and innovation will help drive down the cost of SAF and increase its sustainability.
The future of SAF looks bright as the aviation industry takes steps to reduce its carbon footprint and transition to a more sustainable future. With increased production, technological advancements, government support, partnerships and collaborations, and innovation and experimentation, SAF is set to play a key role in decarbonizing the aviation industry in the coming years.
https://www.exaputra.com/2023/05/benefits-of-saf-sustainable-aviation.html
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap
This exclusive article originally appeared in PES Wind 3 – 2026 with the title, Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap. It was written by Allen Hall and other members of the Weather Guard Lightning Tech team.
As wind fleets expand across increasingly diverse operating environments, the expertise needed to solve their problems is becoming more dispersed. Closing the industry’s knowledge gap means connecting local challenges with specialist experience from across the global wind sector and beyond.
An operator finds something on a blade they have not seen before. Who do they call? The engineer who designed that blade moved on years ago. The service provider has not seen the problem either. Somewhere in the world, there’s probably a person who has spent 15 years working on precisely that failure mode. But there’s no reliable way to find them.
That scenario plays out again and again. It’s rare that a problem is unsolvable. A solution exists somewhere. The bigger problem is finding that solution, or the person close to solving it.
Wind has become a large, geographically dispersed industry with roughly 1.3 TW of installed capacity. The technical knowledge required to keep it running has dispersed with it. The knowledge is real, deep and often highly specialized, but it is scattered across the globe in small teams working in different markets.
This is not the first global industry to discover that no single organization can hold every discipline, and that different parts of the world present different problems.
Two answers, one problem
In January 2023, Andrew Billingsley took a call from Ørsted asking whether his company could recycle wind turbine blades. Billingsley is CEO of Plaswire, a polymer processor in Northern Ireland. It was not a wind company. Plaswire’s business had been built on finding a way to use plastics from aircraft seat manufacturing and other waste nobody else would handle: residue pulled out of biodigesters and municipal waste plants.
He said yes before he was certain the company could do it.
Plaswire had a proprietary process for combining polymers that materials engineers said couldn’t be combined. Ground blade fiber mixed well with the combined polymer. Plaswire says it now has capacity to process up to 11,000 tonnes of blades a year and has increased blade content in its product from ten percent to thirty percent. The company also reports that the resulting structural components can outperform the concrete and timber alternatives they replace.
The same waste stream produced an entirely different answer on the other side of the Atlantic. Everpoint Services in Houston, Texas decommissions wind and solar assets, leaving the company tasked with repurposing fiberglass blades. At a birthday party, Everpoint CEO Tyler Goodell put that problem to James Timmins, a drilling engineer who had spent his career planning and overseeing drilling operations for major oil companies.
Timmins realized that ground blade fiber might work as a fluid loss additive in oil, gas, and geothermal drilling, where fluid escaping into the formation can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day. Everpoint spent the next two years turning that idea into a product. The company says BladeBlok is patented and shipping globally from Houston.
Two regions, two answers, both effective. And in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Northern Ireland has decades of depth in polymers and injection molding, so its answer was a polymer. Houston is a center of the global oil and gas industry, so its answer was drilling mud. Neither answer came out of the wind industry. Both came from regional industrial expertise meeting a problem that happened to land next to it.
Looking beyond Denmark
Modern wind turbine engineering grew up in Denmark, and in many ways it still lives there. The most prevalent turbine design was refined by Danish engineers. DTU Wind and Energy Systems still anchors much of the research on wind turbines. Ask a hard aerodynamic question today and there is a fair chance the answer comes from within Denmark.
What has changed is that designing turbines and operating them are different problems. They no longer happen in the same places. A machine is designed in a small number of locations. It is then operated wherever the wind blows: West Texas, Queensland, Gujarat, the North Sea, and the Spanish meseta.
The fleet is also getting older and more varied as it grows. Machines commissioned during the last boom are aging in ways nobody modeled, on sites with conditions nobody anticipated. That combination generates operational questions faster than any single organization can answer them. Those questions are local, specific, and urgent. Now, companies all over the world are being asked to solve wind’s problems with legacy knowledge, often from an adjacent industry, that originated a long way from where the turbine was built.
The same blade, four climates
The industry’s leading-edge erosion wisdom is shaped largely by northern European conditions. It is a real problem, well studied and well understood. It is also not the same problem in West Texas, where the air carries dust and insects, and where inspections routinely find turbines one to three years old that look as though they have run for far longer. Will Howell of Armour Edge describes one site near an open-cast mine where airborne marble particulates were destroying blades within two seasons.
India produces a variant that exists nowhere in Europe. During the northern dry season, a sticky, tar-like dirt builds on the blades until the flow separates and the blade effectively stalls. The monsoon washes it away. PowerCurve reports that the use of vortex generators in India has produced some of the largest energy gains it has recorded, exceeding five percent across a full year. India is now the fourth-largest wind market on earth, surpassing 56 GW; last year it added more capacity than Germany did.
Rosemary Barnes worked for a Danish blade manufacturer before returning to Australia in 2021 to work in operations. There, she found blades behaving unlike the ones she had known in Europe. The standard method of predicting erosion severity combines annual rainfall with tip speed. But when Barnes plotted Australian sites with known erosion problems against those two axes, she got a random scatter. The model had no predictive value in Australia.
Her firm, Pardalote Consulting, is now placing scientific-grade sensors in Australian wind farms to establish what actually drives erosion there. [Barnes is also a regular host of The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.]
A library of experts
Today, finding the right specialist can be difficult.
After six years hosting the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, I increasingly think of the podcast as a library. In the past year alone, we’ve highlighted solutions from companies in Latvia, Denmark, Northern Ireland, Spain, Australia, Scotland, and the United States. As an organizer of the Wind O&M Australia event, one of our goals has been to bring international expertise to the local market. And similarly, to allow the global market to learn from knowledge that has been internal to Australia.
The answers are out there
The wind industry does not have time to solve the same problem twice. Fleets are aging, budgets are tight, and a blade defect that sits unresolved for a season costs real production. The pressure is to move faster, and the fastest way to solve a problem is rarely on your own. The fastest way to solve a problem is to find the person who has solved it. That search has to be a global one. The specialist who understands your failure mode may be in Copenhagen, Riga, Edinburgh, or Houston, working for a company you have never heard of. Geography is not a reason to rule them out. Increasingly it is the reason to go looking. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast has become one way of documenting that dispersed expertise, bringing together specialists working on specific problems across different markets.
The answers are out there.
Unless otherwise noted, images here are from The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Contact us for help understanding your lightning damage, future risks, and how to get more uptime from your equipment.
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Renewable Energy
Remembering Buckminster Fuller, 20th Century Super-Engineer and His Beliefs about Humanity
Fuller’s words here have been echoed through the ages, e.g., Mahatma Gandhi’s note: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
The problem: Most people living in our capitalist civilization care very little about what Bucky here called “livingry.” The typical person in the developed world thinks almost nothing about starving children and even less about recasting world society into a place where we take care of the wellbeing of everyone.
He was one of the great minds that have ever graced our planet, IMO.
Remembering Buckminster Fuller, 20th Century Super-Engineer and His Beliefs about Humanity
Six months ago, our local CVS drugstore had a manager, a handful of employees answering customers’ questions, checking them out at the cash register, stocking shelves, etc.
Last month, I noticed that most of these employees were gone, and the former manager was now stocking shelves. I also noted long lines of customers waiting for an automated checkout machine to become available.
Last week, I saw the former manager working at a nearby grocery store.
Also, the pharmacy is now closed for an hour for lunch. When I asked about this, I was asked, “Don’t you think we employees deserve to eat lunch?” I responded, “Of course I do. But can’t CVS afford to staff the pharmacy so customers are not inconvenienced?”
This is certainly not a unique–or even rare–occurrence; it seem that CVS is like most large corporations, driven by cost-cutting, while abusing their employees and their customers.
