Fuel suppliers, airlines partner to provide sustainable jet fuel at SFO
12 December 2018
Shell Aviation and SkyNRG have begun supplying sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to international airlines KLM, SAS and Finnair at San Francisco Airport (SFO). The fuel is produced by World Energy.
The initial phase of the arrangement aims to pave the way for longer term, more resilient supply chains for sustainable aviation fuels and reduce the carbon emissions of flights from SFO and other airports. Following May’s agreement, Shell Aviation is the first major fuel supplier to support SFO in its ambition to expand the use of sustainable aviation fuel in its operations.
This initiative responds to the Aviation industry’s targets, including the cap on net aviation CO2 emissions from 2020.
The SAF sourced by SkyNRG from World Energy’s Paramount refinery in Los Angeles is made from used cooking oil, resulting in a fuel that has significantly lower lifecycle carbon emissions than conventional jet fuel. In general, sustainable aviation fuel has a reduction potential of 60-80%, compared to conventional jet fuel.
The SAF is supplied through the existing SFO refuelling infrastructure and can be used by airlines without requiring technical modification to their current fleets.
Consumption of vegetable oils in the USA 2014-16 was only 38.6 kg/capita. If all of this wound up as WVO (waste vegetable oil) at 7 lb/gallon it would only make 12.2 gallons/capita, or about 3.77 billion gallons (90 million bbl) per year.
2017 US consumption of jet fuel was 1.682 million barrels a day. Converting all US vegetable oil to jet fuel would have fed demand for about 56 days. This is the definition of "cannot scale".
Posted by: Engineer-Poet | 12 December 2018 at 03:08 AM