Pittsburgh International Airport sets wheels in motion for SAF hubRunway Girl

For four years, Pittsburgh International Airport’s first-of-its-kind microgrid — powered by natural gas and a solar farm — has given the PIT campus true energy independence, whilst improving its sustainability credentials and saving money. Now, PIT is poised to be among the first airports in the world to provide sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to commercial and cargo operators by producing it onsite at the airport.

Under an arrangement announced in late May, PIT has contracted Avina Synthetic Aviation Fuel (Avina) to build a state-of-the-art SAF production facility just south of its terminal.

Using a range of renewable feedstocks, the facility will produce ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials)-certified SAF by deploying an alcohol-to-jet technology known as PureSAF, which was developed by Swedish Biofuels AB and is exclusively licensed by KBR, a global provider of science, technology, and engineering solutions.

“The U.S. Air Force is already flying with it,” PIT chief executive officer Christina Cassotis said of the fully fungible military grade jet fuel produced by the innovative PureSAF process and validated by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

“We believe that it’s possible to not even have to blend that, that it could be 100% drop in so we’re looking forward to getting that plant built and operational because we know that SAF is the easiest thing to start with,” Cassotis said during the Future Travel Experience (FTE) World Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University, two weeks before Avina was announced as PIT’s partner on the project.

Indeed, the SAF produced via the PureSAF process has “the same or, in some cases, better physical-chemical properties” as fossil jet fuel, according to KBR. Avina said the plant at PIT will have a carbon intensity that is “at least 65% lower than that of conventional jet fuel.”

Because of PureSAF’s feed flexibility — it can use renewable alcohol, synthesis gas (syngas), or carbon dioxide — the resulting SAF is billed by KBR as being more cost competitive than alternative offerings which require separate technologies for conversion of ethanol and gases.

Sitting on 8,800 acres, of which 25-30% has yet to be developed, PIT certainly has the land to accommodate the new SAF production facility, which will be spread across 50 acres. “And we have pipeline access to the [Ohio] River, which means whatever we produce can be barged to other markets,” Cassotis noted.

Moreover, she said of the Pittsburgh region, “we sit in the middle of millions of acres of bio-based feedstock.” This ensures that SAF can be produced at “a much more cost competitive price point, which we hope will be interesting in the industry.”

With plans to produce over 100 million gallons of SAF annually, through multiple phases of development, the facility could open as soon as 2028, enabling PIT’s airline partners to secure SAF readily and cost-effectively, whilst meeting their decarbonization targets. The SAF hub will also “meet local and regional commercial and cargo needs at PIT and beyond,” said the airport.

Elsewhere KBR’s PureSAF technology platform has been selected by Renewable Developments Australia (RDA), in collaboration with Virgin Australia and Qatar Airways to establish a SAF production facility in the Charters Towers Region of North Queensland, Australia. “Here, bioethanol derived from sugarcane grown onsite will be converted to 100% SAF utilizing the ethanol-to-jet pathway,” KBR said.

Meanwhile, PIT’s work to produce economically viable SAF has only just begun. During the FTE summit, Cassotis revealed that the airport is also investigating a SAF pathway using sludge, the output of sewage treatment plants, to convert into fuel.

“One of the biggest things that we see is the cost of producing this green fuel. So, we are looking at that; we have looked at distributed hydrogen projects,” she noted. And under the last administration, PIT explored a pathway to coal mine methane being converted into SAF.

Avina explains the PureSAF process in the following video.