A techno-economic analysis of the environmental and economic feasibility of middle distillate fuel productionviafermentation and advanced fermentation technologies.
Although a relatively small contributor to annual anthropogenic CO 2 emissions (~2.6%), commercial aviation activity is growing at ~5% per annum. As a result, alternative jet fuel (AJF) technologies have garnered interest as a means to achieve large, near-term emissions reductions for the industry. This analysis quantifies the potential for AJF to reduce aviation's CO 2 emissions by assessing: the availability of AJF feedstock; AJF volumes that could be produced from that feedstock; the lifecycle emissions of AJF compared to petroleum-derived jet fuel; and the number of bio-refineries and capital investment required to achieve the calculated emission reductions. We find that, if the use of AJF is to reduce aviation's lifecycle GHG emissions by 50% or more by 2050, prices or policies will have to significantly incentivize the production of bioenergy and waste feedstocks, and AJF production will need to be prioritized over other potential uses of these resources. Reductions of 15% by 2050 would require construction of ~60 new bio-refineries annually (similar to growth in global biofuel production capacity in the early 2000s), and capital investment of ~12 billion USD 2015 per year (~1/5 of annual capital investment in petroleum refining).
In this Article we quantify the optimal allocation and deployment of global bioenergy resources to offset fossil fuels in 2050. We find that bioenergy could reduce lifecycle emissions attributable to combustion-fired electricity and heat, and liquid transportation fuels, by a maximum of 4.9-38.7 Gt CO 2 e, or 9-68%, and that offsetting fossil fuel-fired electricity and heat with bioenergy is on average 1.6-3.9 times more effective for emissions mitigation than offsetting fossil fuelderived liquid fuel. However, liquid fuels make up 18-49% of global optimally allocated final bioenergy in our results for 2050. This indicates that a mix of bioenergy end-uses maximizes lifecycle emissions reductions. Finally, our findings demonstrate that emissions reductions are maximized by limiting deployment of total available primary bioenergy to 29-91%, and that lifecycle emissions are a constraint on the usefulness of bioenergy for mitigating global climate change.
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