Food Waste Could Power American Flights. Illinois Researchers Just Showed How.

A University of Illinois research team has developed a technically feasible, environmentally beneficial method to convert food waste into jet-grade fuel and published their findings in Nature Sustainability.

By the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences — summarized for agInnovation

Sabrina Summers and Yuanhui Zhang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, hold vials of the sustainable aviation fuel developed in their lab.

Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize. You can’t plug a commercial aircraft into an outlet. Battery technology isn’t close to viable at scale. And the industry’s appetite for fuel is enormous and growing. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) offers a path forward, but the supply chain constraints are limiting: there simply isn’t enough feedstock to produce SAF at the volumes the industry needs. A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has developed an approach that addresses that bottleneck in a genuinely novel way: turning food waste into jet-grade fuel.

The process is called hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) and it works by mimicking the natural formation of crude oil, but in a fraction of the time. Food waste is converted into a biocrude oil, which is then refined with a catalyst into jet-grade fuel. The Illinois team used a simplified, more economical approach that relies more heavily on distillation and less on catalytic processing, a tradeoff that produces fuel that needs to be blended with conventional jet fuel, much like ethanol is blended with gasoline. Their tests, based on a 50-50 blend, met jet fuel standards set by the American Society for Testing and Materials and the FAA. Lead researcher Yuanhui Zhang notes that a 10% or 20% blend would be even more practical at scale.

The team also tackled a major byproduct challenge. The HTL process generates a toxic, nutrient-rich byproduct called HTL aqueous phase, and the researchers explored electrochemical treatment to recover acids and nutrients from it rather than sending it to a wastewater plant. Lifecycle analysis found that both the standard and improved treatment approaches could achieve negative carbon emissions, meaning the process could actually remove more carbon from the cycle than it produces. The study was published in Nature Sustainability and points toward a genuinely circular bioeconomy: urban organic waste becomes American aviation fuel while reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

This research was made possible by a combination of public investment: Hatch funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a National Science Foundation award, and support from the Department of Energy. It’s a clear example of how federal funding for agricultural and environmental research creates value far beyond the farm. In this case, potentially reshaping how America powers its aviation industry.

Read the full story at Illinois ACES for the technical details and what comes next on the path toward scale.

Read the full story: Illinois Study Explores Feasibility of Creating Sustainable Jet Fuel from Food Waste

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