Research demonstrates a pathway to sustainably produce biojet fuel domestically and meet the country’s growing aviation fuel demand. Every day in the United States, 45,000 planes fly across the country carrying some 1.7 million passengers. A frequent traveler’s individual contribution to climate
The study found that planting the grass miscanthus on 23.2 million hectares of existing marginal agricultural lands – land that often lays fallow or is poor in soil quality – across the United States would provide enough biomass feedstock to meet the liquid fuel demands of the U.S. aviation sector fully from biofuels, an amount expected to reach 30 billion gallons/year by 2040.
The United States is the largest contributor to aviation carbon dioxide emissions in the world. In fact, it is responsible for more than a quarter of all carbon dioxide emitted from flying.What if we could replace carbon-intensive jet fossil fuels with a cleaner alternative: biojet fuels derived from rain-fed grass grown in the U.S.?shows a pathway toward full decarbonization of U.S. aviation fuel use by substituting conventional jet fuel with sustainably produced biofuels.
“If we are serious about getting to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, we need to deal with emissions from air travel which are expected to grow under a business-as-usual scenario. Finding alternative, more sustainable liquid fuel sources for aviation is key to this.
“The current way we produce sustainable jet fuel is very land inefficient and not on a large scale,” said Nathan Parker, an author on the study and an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability. “There are very limited ways that aviation could become low carbon emitting with a correspondingly low climate impact and this is one way we’ve shown that is feasible and can get the aviation industry to be carbon neutral through agriculture.
To account for these land-atmosphere interactions, the research team took outputs from their hydroclimate model to inform their ecosystem model. The team then evaluated the economic feasibility for farmers to grow these grasses.For any uptake of an alternative energy pathway solutions need to make economic sense.
“These lands we identified are owned and operated by real people for different agricultural uses,” said Uludere Aragon, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The cost-effective biofuel potential from biomass feedstocks is influenced largely by the opportunity cost of alternative land uses.”
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