Research area
Sustainable fuels that produce lower greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-based fuels across their lifecycles offer a promising pathway to decarbonizing critical transportation sectors such as aviation, shipping, and long-distance trucking, which will likely rely on liquid fuels for many more decades.
Decarbonization of aviation, international shipping, and long-haul trucking is necessary to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions produced by the transportation sector. Sustainable fuels, including biofuels and electrofuels (e-fuels), could offer a promising solution for deep decarbonization of these hard-to-abate sectors if technical and economic barriers can be overcome.
The transportation sector will be challenging to decarbonize due to its reliance on energy-dense liquid fuels that are usually petroleum-based. Sustainable fuel alternatives could achieve lower net-greenhouse gas emissions depending on their feedstocks and production pathways. However, they cannot currently be produced as inexpensively as petroleum-based fuels.
Sustainable fuels include biofuels derived from crops, agricultural or forest residues, or waste oils, and e-fuels formulated by combining hydrogen with captured carbon dioxide to produce synthetic versions of today’s liquid fuels. Each of the many potential feedstocks (such as straw, wood chips, and oilseeds) and pathways for producing sustainable fuels has different carbon intensity, cost, supply chain, and scalability. The lifecycle emissions of each sustainable fuel depend heavily on the feedstock and the energy source used in fuel production, especially for e-fuels. Making sustainable fuels a widely-adopted alternative to petroleum-based fuels will require addressing technical, scalability, and economic barriers through both innovation and supportive policies.
MITEI investigates technical, economic, and policy questions related to sustainable fuels. A major focus is on the evaluation of biofuels and e-fuels as petroleum replacements and examining the related lifecycle emissions, market implications, and policy issues.
We have also supported many research projects related to low-carbon hydrogen production pathways and appropriate carriers such as ammonia for long-distance distribution. At the intersection of infrastructure and sustainable fuels, other projects have focused on fuel distribution networks, refueling infrastructure, and optimal configuration of combined hydrogen and electric charging infrastructure for vehicles.
MITEI analyzes the techno-economics, lifecycle emissions, and use-case scenarios of different sustainable fuels to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors such as long-distance transportation.
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