Canada’s wood waste could supply 5 times its jet-fuel demand, new white paper finds

Sustaero, a Canadian developer of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) projects, announced Nov. 2 that it has released a white paper titled “Wood Waste: Canada’s SAF Feedstock Advantage.”

The white paper evaluates global SAF feedstocks and finds that while the fats and oils used in hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) face supply limits, wood waste is the single largest feedstock available to decarbonize global jet fuel.

“Meeting global SAF targets requires moving beyond scarce lipid feedstocks to abundant, sustainable ones,” said Keith Gillard, CEO of Sustaero. “By pairing Canada’s managed forest residues with low-carbon electricity, we can economically produce drop-in jet fuel with 90 percent lower carbon intensity (CI) and position Canada as a premier global fuel exporter.”

Key takeaways from the white paper include:

• Feedstock scale: Canada holds close to 9 percent of the world’s forests. Converted via conventional gasification and Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis, Canada’s gross wood waste could supply more than 2.5 times current domestic jet-fuel demand.

• Hydrogen doubles yield: Adding low-carbon electrolytic hydrogen through Sustaero’s proprietary Syngas Optimization for Aviation Renewables (SOAR™) process roughly doubles fuel yield per dry metric ton, enabling Canada’s logging and uncommitted mill residues alone to supply more than five times current domestic jet-fuel demand.

• 90 percent lower CI: Powered by low-carbon, hydro-dominated grids, hydrogen-enhanced wood-to-SAF achieves a 90 percent reduction in lifecycle CI compared with fossil jet fuel, as independently calculated by Brightspot Climate.

• One-fifth the feedstock cost: On an energy-adjusted basis, clean wood waste costs approximately one-fifth as much as HEFA feedstocks such as used cooking oil or tallow, avoiding the price pressure and supply ceilings facing lipid pathways.

• Lessons from legacy failures: The paper finds that past first-of-a-kind biorefinery failures stemmed from contaminated feedstocks, such as municipal solid waste, and custom technology integration. Sustaero mitigates both by using clean wood residues and commercially proven licensor technology at technology-readiness level 9 (TRL 9), the highest level.

The release comes as Canada proposes amendments to its Clean Fuel Regulations that would give SAF produced in Canada from North American feedstocks an effective 1.8-times credit multiplier (an 80 percent top-up in compliance credits).

Gillard, author of the paper, will present its findings Nov. 2 at the Alternative Fuels and Chemicals Coalition Global Biobased Economy Conference and then again at the Sustainable Aviation Futures North American Congress in Houston, Texas, taking place Nov. 4-6.

The full white paper, “Wood Waste: Canada’s SAF Feedstock Advantage,” can be downloaded after registering at Sustaero.ca.