Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Friday, September 16, 2011

Fly the (hic!) friendly skies: renewable jet fuel from alcohol

Biofuels Digest
Jim Lane September 14, 2011

Making renewable jet fuel from booze…uh, alcohol…is the latest drop-in biofuels craze. Who is doing what, with whom, and when? And how do they do it?

When most of us think of highly customized aviation alcohols, we probably think of the little bottles of Johnnie Walker. But a handful of companies such as Cobalt, Gevo, Terrabon, LanzaTech and ZeaChem, are shaking up the emerging aviation biofuels markets by developing renewable aviation fuels from ethanol and/or biobutanol.

It’s been an improbable mission, but a handful are getting close enough that we had better explain the background before they achieve massive scale.

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