Parallel Session 11 – Progress in transport biofuels

Thursday 24 October 2024, 8.30-10.00 BRT

Moderator: Franziska Müller-Langer (DBFZ, Germany)

Speakers:

Panelists (L-to-R): Franziska Müller-Langer, Andrea Sonnleitner, José Muisers, Tomas Ekbom, Jack Saddler, Fuli Li.

Selected conclusions and key messages:

  • The impacts of climate change are showing prominently. Around 10 years ago, 15-17 million hectares of forests in Canada were killed by pine Beetles, which was a direct effect of warming winters. In the last few years – particularly in 2023 – there has been a record level of forest fires. Wildfires in Canada released around 2400 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023, equivalent to four times the amount of GHG emissions of the Canadian economy in 2021. Storms and excessive rainfall are having increasingly devastating effects all over the world. This shows the urgent need for climate action, to bring down greenhouse gas emissions, but also to adapt land and forest management to this new reality (e.g. managing forests for higher resilience and lower fire risk).
  • Transport is one of the sectors where urgent action is needed. Next to electrification, low carbon-intensity (CI) biofuels will be essential if aviation, marine, and long-distance trucking are to decarbonize, and large volumes will be needed. It is estimated that the capacity of renewable fuels production (biofuels and e-fuels) needs to increase 10-fold by 2050. There is no “silver bullet”. Commercialization of various types of technologies should be pursued (utilizing different feedstocks, considering regional differences, etc.). It is crucial to involve current refining companies to reach scale. We already see a trend of retrofitting oil refineries with oil-based biofuels.
  • Thermochemical routes to produce “advanced” biofuels from lignocellulosic material are being demonstrated in a European project to facilitate the commercialization step. Examples are pyrolysis followed by upgrading to transport fuels, or gasification followed by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and upgrading of the FT waxes.
  • Biofuels and biochemicals can also be produced from CO2 through synthetic biology and fermentation. Through CO2 fixation microbial lipids may be produced which are a basis for renewable diesel or sustainable aviation fuel. Mind that the process also requires substantial sustainable energy inputs.
  • While technical challenges for more advanced biofuels remain, the price difference compared to “conventional” fuels remains the biggest obstacle. Enabling policies are essential to support the development of low carbon-intensity biofuels and there are significant developments in different regions of the world in that direction. A crucial topic is to find consensus on how to determine the carbon intensity of these fuels.
  • Fuel policy frameworks increasingly focus on (further) reducing CO2 emissions. There are some differences between frameworks, e.g. in EU-RED, ICAO-CORSIA, US-IRA, LCFS-CA, RenovaBio. This leads to differences in the degree of stringency and robustness of policy frameworks for GHG emission reduction. Particularly sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) rely on international trade and supply chains. Six potential sensitivities in the SAF supply chain and auditing process are identified: (1) data quality / transparency; (2) GHG target setting and calculation methodologies; (3) feedstock categorization; (4) certification/verification; (5) auditor qualifications; (6) potential misuse. A lack of harmonization is a key barrier for economic operators, and it holds back trade.