Innovation in fuel technology is changing the aviation industry for the better. A new podcast from ASTM describes how.

By Regan Daley

Oct 04, 2024

Aviation fuels play an important role in helping us get from point A to B. And in an era when sustainability is of increasing concern to the field of aviation, new blends of biofuels are helping increase the sustainability and safety of the fuels the aviation industry uses. 

Join host JP Ervin, Ph.D., as he talks to guests Scott Fenwick, Mark Rumizen, and Melanie Thom on the latest episode of Standards Impact, "Alternative Fuels Take Off." Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or click on our bio link and look for today's top headline.

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Read an excerpt of the discussion or listen to the full episode below.

JP Ervin:  I was wondering if you could spell out the advantage of using these types of fools or why people are interested in them, why they're interested in finding alternative sources – or why sustainability is a factor in this. 

Mark Rumizen: Relative to aviation, I think I mentioned when I first spoke that aviation is somewhat unique. And ironically, what drove the interest in alternative fuels back in the early 2000s was two factors. One was environmental, the idea of carbon emissions and their contribution to climate change. But the other driver was supply security, that relative to aviation, because of the military interest in aviation fuel, there was also concern about the stability of global petroleum supplies. So those two factors drove the interest in producing fuels from alternative raw materials, not petroleum. And the important thing to understand about aviation fuel is that ironically, these aren't really different fuels or alternative fuels in aviation. Because one of the criteria that we gave ourselves or one of the constraints we gave ourselves was that these fuels had to be what we call "drop-in fuels."

Meaning they had to be essentially the same fuel chemically, performance-wise, compositionally exactly the same fuel. But if you make them from different materials, on one hand, you can address the supply security issue. Because as Scott mentioned, fisher tropes fuel can be made from coal, of which the U.S. has abundant reserves. The environmental aspect of it is if you make it from renewable materials, you are extracting as much carbon from the atmosphere as you're putting back in when you burn the fuel. So again, the important point is that with aviation, our alternative fuels or our sustainable fuels, are jet fuel. They're the same jet fuel that is made from petroleum, exactly the same end-product. And we address those two drivers by making that same fuel from an alternative raw material. And so you satisfy the drivers for sustainability."