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$50 mil­lion for the world’s first plant to pro­duce sus­tain­able avi­ation fuel from alcohol

25.10.2022

Break­through Energy announced that the first Cata­lyst pro­ject fund­ing in the form of a $50 mil­lion grant will go to Free­dom Pines Fuels’ sus­tain­able avi­ation fuel (SAF) facil­ity in Sop­er­ton, GA. Break­through Energy Cata­lyst is a unique pro­gram that brings togeth­er busi­nesses and phil­an­throp­ic organ­iz­a­tions to accel­er­ate the adop­tion of enabling tech­no­lo­gies by fund­ing crit­ic­al first-time com­mer­cial-scale projects.


Lan­za­Jet’s Free­dom Pines Fuels pro­ject, sched­uled to be oper­a­tion­al in 2023, is the com­pany’s first com­mer­cial-scale SAF plant and will be the first in the world to pro­duce Alco­hol-to-Jet SAF, which will reduce emis­sions by at least 70% com­pared to fossil jet fuel. Once fully oper­a­tion­al, the plant will play a crit­ic­al role in scal­ing SAF pro­duc­tion and bring­ing lower cost sus­tain­able fuels to mar­ket. The plant is expec­ted to pro­duce nine mil­lion gal­lons of SAF and one mil­lion gal­lons of renew­able dies­el fuel annu­ally, roughly doub­ling cur­rent SAF pro­duc­tion in the US. Con­struc­tion of the plant will enable sig­ni­fic­ant expan­sion of Lan­za­Jet tech­no­logy in the U.S. and glob­ally, with addi­tion­al pro­jects already in the plan­ning stages in North Amer­ica, Europe and Asia that togeth­er would pro­duce more than one bil­lion gal­lons of SAF annu­ally.

First-time new tech­no­logy pro­jects often have a dif­fi­cult time obtain­ing low-cost cap­it­al because of the high envir­on­ment­al premi­ums asso­ci­ated with them and the unfore­seen chal­lenges and costs they often face, espe­cially in the cur­rent infla­tion­ary envir­on­ment. By provid­ing cap­it­al for these types of early com­mer­cial assets, Cata­lyst fin­an­cing can reduce the risk to fol­low-on invest­ments and accel­er­ate the adop­tion of clean tech­no­lo­gies. In this case, the Cata­lyst grant to Free­dom Pines Fuels has filled a fund­ing gap and will allow the facil­ity to meet its cur­rent devel­op­ment sched­ule.

Import­antly, the grant will also spur fur­ther SAF innov­a­tion by help­ing to cre­ate a new mar­ket for scal­able, low-car­bon eth­an­ol from sus­tain­able sources by set­ting the expect­a­tion that the plant will trans­ition to second-gen­er­a­tion eth­an­ol, includ­ing from waste-based feed­stocks, by year five. This con­ver­sion com­ple­ments the work Lan­za­Jet is already doing to build SAF plants using second-gen­er­a­tion eth­an­ol in the UK and to devel­op stra­tegic part­ner­ships to accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment of this advanced fuel, for which there is cur­rently lim­ited sup­ply in the mar­ket.

​“Break­through Energy Cata­lyst is a new way for the private sec­tor to accel­er­ate the trans­ition to clean energy by fund­ing pro­jects that ensure crit­ic­al cli­mate solu­tions come to mar­ket as quickly as the world needs them,” said Rodi Gui­dero, Exec­ut­ive Dir­ect­or, Break­through Energy & Man­aging Part­ner, Break­through Energy Ven­tures. ​“Lan­za­Jet’s new sus­tain­able avi­ation fuel plant could play a crit­ic­al role in decar­bon­iz­ing avi­ation while demon­strat­ing how clean energy jobs and busi­nesses can power com­munit­ies. We are grate­ful to Cata­lys­t’s part­ners who under­stand that cli­mate lead­er­ship means sup­port­ing the tech­no­lo­gies that elim­in­ate emis­sions, and that solv­ing our cli­mate chal­lenges requires noth­ing less than mobil­iz­ing the glob­al eco­nom­ic engine to build a net-zero future.”

​“Lan­za­Jet is built on innov­a­tion, and we work every day with a sense of urgency to address our glob­al cli­mate chal­lenge,” said Jimmy Samartzis, CEO of Lan­za­Jet. ​“To max­im­ize our impact and scale our tech­no­logy to deliv­er large volumes of sus­tain­able avi­ation fuel glob­ally, part­ner­ships are import­ant. We have a real oppor­tun­ity on our door­step to sig­ni­fic­antly scale our tech­no­logy and deploy it glob­ally, and we would­n’t be able to build this facil­ity as quickly or afford­ably if we did­n’t have Break­through Energy’s Cata­lyst grant, which lowers our over­all cap­it­al costs and is crit­ic­al to redu­cing emis­sions and accel­er­at­ing SAF’s adop­tion in the glob­al mar­ket­place.

Avi­ation accounts for approx­im­ately 2 to 3% of glob­al green­house gas emis­sions annu­ally, and as a ​“drop-in” fuel, sus­tain­able avi­ation fuels offer an import­ant oppor­tun­ity to rap­idly decar­bon­ize avi­ation with exist­ing air­craft cur­rently in ser­vice around the world. Pro­duced from a vari­ety of low-car­bon, sus­tain­able feed­stocks such as agri­cul­tur­al waste, muni­cip­al sol­id waste, energy crops, or car­bon cap­tured from indus­tri­al pro­cesses or ambi­ent air, SAF is an equi­val­ent replace­ment for con­ven­tion­al jet fuel and is com­pat­ible with exist­ing air­craft and infra­struc­ture. SAF can dra­mat­ic­ally reduce life­cycle green­house gas emis­sions com­pared to con­ven­tion­al fuel pro­duced from crude oil, while sig­ni­fic­antly improv­ing loc­al air qual­ity by redu­cing con­ven­tion­al air pol­lut­ants such as par­tic­u­late mat­ter.

Break­through Energy’s Cata­lyst grant joins pre­vi­ous sup­port­ers of Lan­za­Jet’s Free­dom Pines Fuels facil­ity, which has received fund­ing from the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy and the Microsoft Cli­mate Innov­a­tion Fund, as well as invest­ments from Lan­za­Jet share­hold­ers Mit­sui & Co, Sun­cor Energy, Lan­zaT­ech, Brit­ish Air­ways and Shell. The con­struc­tion of the facil­ity comes at a unique time for SAF. The recently signed Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act provides tax cred­its that will help boost SAF’s pro­duc­tion in the U.S. and make clean jet fuels more com­pet­it­ive. In addi­tion, $297 mil­lion is ear­marked for a grant pro­gram to sup­port the deploy­ment of clean avi­ation tech­no­lo­gies, includ­ing SAF

Source

Lan­za­Jet

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