Jet Fuel is a modern marvel, allowing commercial planes to carry hundreds of passengers halfway around the world and military planes to regularly break the speed of sound.
Yet jet fuel as we know it could be on the chopping block as the world strives to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Commercial aviation is responsible for 2.5% of all carbon pollution, a share that is likely to grow like other electrofy industries, an option that is not sustainable for long-haul flights.
But if jet fuel can be made with carbon dioxide, it could get a stay of execution.
A handful of startups have raced to develop a cheap and efficient way to use electricity to transform CO2 Into an energy-dense hydrocarbon that can be slipped into an airplane’s fuel tanks without noticing the difference. But replacing cheap fossil fuels is a tall hurdle, one that many companies have failed to overcome.
But one startup thinks it has narrowed the problem with a fairly simple approach. “We’re not trying to necessarily reinvent chemistry,” Joe Rodden, co-founder and CEO of Lydian, told TechCrunch. “We are trying to make the plant and equipment much more economical and also flexibly operated.”
The first half of that equation—cheaper equipment—has an obvious effect on the final cost of Lydian e-fuel. The second is more nuanced, taking advantage of a quirk of renewable power: sometimes it gets really, really cheap.
Lydian takes advantage of those low, low prices by using a very efficient catalyst to turn CO2 and hydrogen in the jet fuel and oxygen. This allows the company to make the most of the grill’s limited-time offers. “You can reduce power costs by up to half by simply shaving 20% or 30% off the utilization rate,” Rodden said.
For an experienced plant operator, part-time equipment may not seem like the most profitable approach. Industrial facilities like Lydian typically operate 24/7 in an attempt to snag the most expensive product.
“The chemical process industry has been very good at optimizing those plants in the context of 24/7 operations,” Rodden said. “But when you break that assumption, you start drawing different conclusions, like maybe that component doesn’t make sense. Can we get rid of it? ”
Rodden said that because Lydian’s reactors run part-time, his company has been able to eliminate a number of complex parts that add to materials and manufacturing costs.
As a result, Lydian can produce e-com-fuel competitive with biofuels when electricity prices are around 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour, Rodden said, which is typical for some solar and wind farms. If power prices get cheaper than they could at the end of the decade, he added, they might be able to compete with fossil fuels.
How competitive depends on the market Lydian ends up selling in. Europe, for example, is shutting down the amount of polluting airlines, which promises to increase demand for biofuels and e-bars, even though they are more expensive than traditional jet fuel. Elsewhere, smaller airports that have to pay handsomely for jet fuel deliveries may opt to install a few Lydian reactors and create their own.
But Lydian is also looking beyond commercial aviation. The US military is the world’s largest user of fossil fuels, and jet fuel makes up a significant portion of that. At bases in the United States, securing supplies is not much of a problem. But at forward bases in conflict zones, fuel must be shipped, creating a costly and lengthy supply chain that is vulnerable to enemy attack. About 3,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed or wounded while delivering water and fuel between 2003 and 2007.
“This is an application where the willingness to pay can really be almost limitless,” Rodden said.
Instead of long supply chains, Rodden predicts that Lydian’s reactors that generate fuel will need them, powered by solar-based, wind or nuclear power. The startup received a DARPA award to further develop the technology.
Recently, Lydian wrapped construction of a pilot plant in North Carolina that can produce up to 25 gallons of e-fuel per day. That may not seem like much when you consider that a Boeing 737-800 at Cruising Altitude burns that much every minute and a half. But Rodden said that’s 100 times more than the company has produced in the lab and 10,000 times more than when it started two and a half years ago. Lydian will run the pilot for a few years, collecting data, while it builds a commercial-scale facility that it hopes to finish in 2027.
If Lydian can maintain that kind of momentum and the world can reduce fossil fuel consumption, e-fuels could be the last hydrocarbon standing.
