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Airline creates venture capital fund for sustainable fuel
Chicago-based United — along with partners Air Canada, Boeing, GE Aerospace, JPMorgan Chase and Honeywell — kick-started the initiative with more than $100 million in funding.
CLIMATEWIRE | United Airlines Inc. launched a venture capital fund Tuesday that's designed to help startup companies research and develop sustainable aviation fuels.
The Chicago-based airline — along with partners Air Canada, Boeing Co., GE Aerospace, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Honeywell International Inc. — kick-started the initiative with more than $100 million in funding. It's one piece of a broader company effort by United to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
"This fund is unique. It's not about offsets or things that are just greenwashing," said United CEO Scott Kirby in a statement. "Instead, we're creating a system that drives investment to build a new industry around sustainable aviation fuel, essentially from scratch. That's the only way we can actually decarbonize aviation."
One goal of the fund is to help sustainable fuel startups whose products have not yet reached a level of “technological readiness,” but have shown promising signs, said Andrew Chang, managing director of United Airlines Ventures, which created the fund.
“All of these technologies are still very early stage, and that's the problem,” Chang added. “And that's why we exist — to try to accelerate the [research and development], the technology development, the commercialization of these early stage ideas. Anything that has some probability of producing fuel from nonfossil-based means is within our scope.”
Sustainable aviation fuel reduces a carbon footprint from flying by producing jet fuel from renewable biomass and waste resources, according to the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office.
Currently, it is made from leftover grease such as used cooking oil or discarded animal fat. Those fuel sources are short in supply, although they emit much less compared with traditional jet fuel, said Michael Wolcott, director of the Institute for Sustainable Design at Washington State University.
The challenge is to diversify the feedstock for low-emissions fuel, which would in the near future come from trash piles, forest residuals, agricultural waste or even new crops grown for the purpose of generating aviation fuel, Wolcott said.
Cemvita and Dimensional Energy — two startups that United funds — each aim to produce fuel from genetically engineered microbes and captured carbon from factories and power plants.
Another goal is to dramatically reduce the cost of producing sustainable fuel, as it now costs “two to five times more” than traditional jet fuel, Wolcott said.
Carbon-based liquid fuels could be the best bet to rapidly reduce carbon emissions from the aviation sector, Wolcott said. As opposed to low-emissions fuels that could be dropped into existing refineries, aircraft and transport facilities, hydrogen or battery cells technologies are still too far behind and incompatible with the current supply chain for it to be the right solutions for meeting zero-emissions target by midcentury, Wolcott said.
Hydrogen and battery cells “may be more viable when we have a completely decarbonized economy,” Wolcott said. “So the problem is, how do we get from here to there?"
