Air company and Air Force collaborate to create jet fuel from just air and water in project SynCe. This project involves the installation of a Carbon Conversion Reactor that aims to produce synthetic jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.
Air Company, established in 2017, has chosen Bushwick, Brooklyn as its experimental hub for creating sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) using a groundbreaking technique called power-to-liquid that converts water and carbon dioxide into fuel. The company has secured $65 million from the Air Force Defense Innovation Unit for its innovative project.
Air Company extracts a small amount of water from the municipal supply and uses electrolysis to split it into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is released back into the atmosphere while the hydrogen is stored at high pressure.
The company sources biogenic CO2 from ethanol fermentation to mix with the compressed hydrogen, which ultimately turns into fuel.
The carbon is captured from New York and transported to Brooklyn for fuel production. However, for larger-scale production, Air Company is considering locating facilities closer to the carbon source to reduce emissions from transportation. This lowers the overall lifecycle emissions of sustainable aviation fuel.
In December 2006, a B-52 bomber completed a 7-hour flight using a 50/50 blend of traditional jet fuel and a synthetic fuel called Syntroleum, produced through the Fischer-Tropsch process. Since then, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) has been used by over 50 airlines on over 450,000 flights.
However, Air Company claims its AirMade fuel is unique in that it’s a ‘drop-in’ kerosene that doesn’t need blending with fossil fuels and can be produced using only carbon dioxide, unlike its predecessors. Additionally, AirMade is environmentally friendly, and its cost is comparable to traditional fossil fuels.
Air Company asserts that their carbon-neutral fuel leads to a remarkable 94 to 97 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions (depending on the origin of electricity), which they claim is the highest in the market.
In contrast, other biofuels, according to a chart released by Air Company, only result in a 60 to 80 percent reduction, while conventional Fischer-Tropsch-based PTL-FT procedures achieve a 90 percent reduction, but require a 50-50 mixture with fossil fuels or even worse.
Air Company’s scalable venture has the potential to appeal to the Air Force by achieving its carbon emission reduction goals and executing the Agile Combat Employment (ACE) doctrine.
As Air Company and Air Force collaborate to create jet fuel from just air and water, the ability to quickly deploy fuel-generating systems to these dispersed bases would simplify logistics, making ACE easier to execute.
Source: Air Company
