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55 min ago 2 min read
California-based renewable fuels firm Circularity Fuels claims to have completed the world’s first end-to-end conversion of raw agricultural biogas into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
End-to-end conversion means taking unrefined gas captured directly from decomposing farm waste (like cow manure or crop residues) and processing it through a single, fully integrated system on-site to produce finished, flight-ready jet fuel.
Over a six-month pilot run on biogas drawn straight from a California dairy farm’s manure digester, Circularity produced drop-in jet fuel meeting ASTM D7566 Annex A1 specifications.
The pilot host, a dairy of more than 5,000 head near Madera, California, currently vents nearly all of its biogas to the atmosphere despite sitting in the heart of the country’s largest dairy region. Circularity’s system lets operators like this one monetise that methane on-site, without the cost of removing carbon dioxide.
Over thousands of operating hours, Circularity’s two-reactor system ran on raw biogas (about 65% methane and 35% CO₂) drawn straight from the dairy’s digester and produced finished jet fuel.
The stack pairs the electrified Ouro bi-reforming reactor with the compact Aion Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactor. Both are modular, low-cost, skid-mounted reactors, so the system is sized for the small, distributed scales at which biogas is actually produced.
The pilot puts commercial SAF within reach at less than $100,000 per barrel-per-day of installed capacity at commercial scale, about one-fifth the capital cost of SAF plants currently under construction in Europe, according to the company.
