Turning last night’s leftovers into fuel for airplanes of the future

One person’s trash is another person’s… jet fuel? Strange as it might sound, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign believe that they’ve figured out a process to make that unlikely scenario a reality–at least on a small scale.

Writing … in Nature Communications, the agricultural engineers outlined a strategy for taking excess food waste, converting it into biofuel, and then “upgrading” that fuel into jet fuel that can go straight into a plane without requiring additional changes to the aircraft’s infrastructure. They compared their food-waste-derived fuel against industry benchmarks and found that it met all the necessary standards for conventional jet fuel.

Though these findings are still more of a proof of concept, they open up the exciting possibility of using food waste … to help the aviation industry move closer to its ambitious goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions within the next three decades.

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While ethanol and other biomass-based derivatives have been available for cars for decades, they have remained more elusive for airplanes because their chemical composition does not meet the much stricter requirements necessary for jet fuel.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here