Is sewage the future of green aviation?
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What are the current challenges facing the aviation fuel industry?
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You're listening to Shortwave, from NPR. Hey Shortwavers, Regina Barber here. And Emily Kwong, and today we are taking to the skies on the wings of cooking oil.
Well, today, Flight 100 is flying from London to New York on sustainable fuel.
Okay, that's Richard Branson. Yes. The co-founder of the Virgin Group. Was this the first flight run entirely on alternative jet fuel?
Yes. Wow. Virgin Atlantic in 2023 operated a flight powered by biofuel and a synthetic alternative made from plant sugars. This flight was incredibly expensive, receiving up to one million British pounds from the UK government, all to prove a scientific point. that a plane can fully run on something other than jet fuel, which, as you know, comes from fossil fuels.
I love this, because what's getting us into the air now, it's not great for a planet. No.
At any given moment, there are thousands of planes in the air, and jet fuel is the only thing energy-dense enough and cheap enough to keep that industry aloft. But the war in Iran has put a damper on those economics. Ryan Spies, the managing director of sustainability for Alaska Airlines, is definitely feeling the pinch.
We were on track for a really, really great year and fuel prices have, you know, put us back hundreds of millions of dollars.
How is sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced?
Right. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for months. So some airlines are running low on fuel. Ticket prices have gone up. This has already affected my travel this year. I've cut back.
Oh, really? Yeah. Well, honestly, that is an airline company's worst nightmare. They need our butts in those seats to meet their bottom line. So in a strange way, this global crisis has kicked down the door for a new kind of conversation about alternatives to jet fuel. And someone who pointed this out to me is Annie Petsonk, the former assistant secretary of transportation for aviation and international affairs under the Biden administration.
Because of the Iran war fuel price shocks, A number of airlines and a number of policymakers are starting to see alternative fuel as a national security matter. We can produce our own fuel here in the United States and not be dependent on foreign oil producers.
Today on the show, greener flights. We explore a bunch of alternatives to jet fuel. Their chemistry, their cost, and what it would actually take to decarbonize the aviation industry for good.
I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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All right, Emily, let's start with basics. Okay. So the chemistry of alternatives to jet fuel. So some people call this fuel sustainable aviation fuel or SAF, so S-A-F, SAF. What's it made out of?
Yeah, so the most commonly used SAF is made from cooking oils, fats, and greases. I love those. Yeah, at a molecular level, they're similar to jet fuel. These long chains of hydrocarbons go through a chemical glow-up to be something that airplanes can fly on. Cool. This process is known as HEFA. which stands for hydroprocess esters and fatty acids. And by the way, that Virgin Atlantic flight we mentioned earlier was mostly powered by HEFA fuel. And this fuel is chemically similar to renewable diesels, which are already used in land and aquatic vehicles.
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