Quantitative Policy Analysis for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Production Technologies

13-C-AJFF-MIT-048, 058This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Please cite this article as: Wang ZJ, Staples MD, Tyner WE, Zhao X, Malina R, Olcay H, Allroggen F and Barrett SRH (2021) Quantitative Policy Analysis for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Production Technologies. Front. Energy Res. 9:751722. doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2021.751722This paper quantifies the impact of different policy options on the economic viability of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production technologies. The pathways considered include isobutanol to jet from corn grain, hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) from inedible fats and oils, HEFA from palm fatty acid distillate, synthesized iso-paraffins from sugarcane, Fischer-Tropsch (FT) gasification and synthesis from municipal solid waste, and micro FT from wood residues. The policies considered include feedstock subsidies, capital grants, output based incentives, and two policies intended to reduce project risk. Stochastic techno-economic analysis models are used to quantify the policies\u2019 impact on project net present value and minimum selling price of the middle distillate fuel products. None of the technology pathways studied are found to be financially viable without policy aid. The median total policy costs required for economic viability range from 35 to 337 million USD per production facility, or 0.07\u20130.71 USD/liter. Our results indicate that the cumulative impact of multiple policies, similar in magnitude to analogous real-world fuel policies, could result in economically viable SAF production