Sustainable Aviation Fuel Goals
237 million acres of soybeans will be required meet our renewable jet fuel goal
237 million acres of soybeans will be required meet our renewable jet fuel goal
Today I was reading an article on OilPrice.com titled The U.S. Plan To Power 100% Of Its Flights With Renewable Jet Fuel.
As an agriculture guy who knows that Sustainable Aviation Fuel is made from soybeans, the first question that entered my mind was; Is it possible to power 100% of US commercial flights with SAF? What would that look like.
US Airline Fuel Usage
We should start by seeing how many gallons of jet fuel airlines in the US consume each year. Total fuel consumption of U.S. airlines in 2019 according to Statista was 18.27 Billion gallons.
Soybeans required to make SAF
Finding how many soybeans are required to produce a gallon of SAF was tough to find, but I did find out that it takes 1 bushel of soybeans to produce 1.5 gallons of biodiesel according to the University of Nebraska.
American Soybean Association reports that SAF requires more soybeans per gallon than biodiesel or renewable diesel:
Another interesting aspect is the amount of feedstock required to produce a gallon of fuel. More pounds of feedstock are required per gallon of finished SAF compared to biodiesel or renewable diesel.
Not knowing exactly how much more soybean feedstock is required for SAF, I decided to use the biodiesel number to estimate how many acres it would take to reach the 100% renewable jet fuel goal, and keep in mind that the result I get will be a conservative estimate.
Therefore, 1 bushel of soybeans to produce less than 1.5 gallons of SAF.
Bushels of soybeans to supply 18.27 Billion gallons of SAF
18.27 Billion gallons of jet fuel divided by 1.5 gallons per bushel of soybeans = 12.18 Billion bushels of soybeans required.
USDA reports we had a record soybean yield per acre of 51.4 bushels in 2022. So using that record high yield we would need:
12,180,000,000 bushels divided by 51.4 bushels/acre = 236,964,980 acres!!!
That is 236.96 million acres of soybeans to meet our renewable jet fuel goal!
And remember, this is a conservative estimate. Also, this is just the US requirements, what about all the other airlines of the world?
Remember, this does not include the estimated 55-60 million additional soybean acres required to supply the renewable diesel plants currently under construction!(link)
We currently have 88.3 million acres of soybeans in the US today.
OK. What if we only meet the goal of 5% SAF for airlines by 2030 which the International Energy Agency suggests?
The OilPrice.com article mentioned above had this to say:
Renewable jet fuel currently accounts for only 0.1 percent of aviation fuel, a percentage that needs to increase to 5 percent by 2030 according to the IEA’s estimates.
5% of 236.96 million acres is 11.85 million acres. This is on top of the 55-60 million acres for the current renewable diesel plants being constructed. Combined, that is over 3/4 of our current soybean acres. Even the 5% SAF goal is preposterous.
Other unintended consequences
Obviously, this is never going to work and I can’t believe educated people are discussing it. Even with close to $2 government subsidies per gallon, cropland is not available on this scale. Deforestation and other ecosystem destruction will happen - in the US and in other countries that can grow soybeans.
Even if we only reach 2% SAF, it will have huge impacts on food prices, ecosystems, animal feeding operations, and land use changes. Massive amounts of investment in soybean crushing operations, transportation infrastructure. Also, the price of soybean oil will increase making SAF much more expensive than regular jet fuel - not to mention the price of food for a hungry world.
Let’s just throw out a few numbers so we can be seen as the ‘smart’ ones. What fools.
Nevermind all the diesel-powered machinery required to harvest and process all those soybeans. Presumably that's all supposed to be powered by renewable diesel though, right? Thus requiring more cropland.