The fastest growing airline in Brazil, Avianca now operates one of the newest, most modern aircraft fleets in Latin America. Brazil, a world leader in the production of sugar cane ethanol, can leverage the Byogy ATJ process and lead the world in the development of a truly sustainable renewable aviation fuel industry.

Avianca has selected its Airbus A319, powered by CFMI (a partnership between General Electric and SNECMA of France) CFM56 engines, as the fleet member to be used with Byogy for advanced testing and data acquisition which will support the ATJ specification adoption process which is well under way with the global ASTM governing organization.

The road to achieve certification of an alternative aviation fuel and reach commercial scale volume production is challenging and long. Avianca is the right partner for long journeys.

—Kevin Weiss, President and CEO of Byogy

The ATJ process broadly consists of four main steps: dehydration of the alcohol; oligomerization; distillation; and hydrogenation. Alcohol is attractive as a feedstock for the production of renewable jet fuel partly because the steps required are currently in use at commercial scale in the petrochemical industry. Key to the cost-effectiveness of ATJ is reducing the production cost of the alcohol, as well as of the ATJ process itself.

Byogy has developed a patent-pending catalytic four-step process that efficiently and cost-effectively converts any ethanol directly to renewable jet fuel. The process leverages a global exclusive license that Byogy obtained from Synfuels International Inc., a Gas to Liquid (GTL) technology provider, covering the entire global “bio” space.