Project Number: 101
Category: Alternative Jet Fuel
This project will serve to acquire, distribute, test, and document SAF and other reference conventional fuel samples. At present, accessing SAF samples is costly for the FAA and difficult for many research groups. Private, Federal, and public research entities have issues collecting relevant SAF samples for testing. The lack of access inhibits research progress in SAF. Concurrently, procuring SAF materials is costlier for the FAA as samples are charged the full overhead rates, and individual acquisitions do not benefit from economies of scale. Fuel samples after acquisition will be tested for critical properties and then distributed to labs, per the FAA’s preference. A small portion of the acquired fuels will be retained for posterity and additional testing if anomalous observations are made.
Outcomes
The creation of such a facility within the public sector facilitates the timely distribution of potential SAF products from producers to evaluators. This is critical to the rapid growth of SAF producers and production pathways that is necessary to achieve an average 1.6x annual growth rate as necessary to achieve 3 billion gallons annual production and usage of SAF by Y-2030, from the basis of 5 million gallons in Y-2021 Beyond Y-2030, continued expansion of SAF producers and production pathways will be necessary to achieve net-zero carbon emissions from the aviation industry by 2050.
Activities funded by the proposed work will include:
- 1.Investigating detailed needs and requirements of a SAF Repository.
- 2.Procuring SAF and conventional fuel samples for testing
- 3.Testing procured samples for reference data to be leveraged by other partners
- 4.Developing a data management protocol for sharing and distributing data
- 5.Distributing fuel samples and data to partners per FAA’s priority
Last updated 7/20/2023