Comparison of Production Pathways and Process Strategies for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Production from Lower Alcohols

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Abstract
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) production from lower alcohols via the Methanol-to-Jet (MtJ) and Ethanol-to-Jet (EtJ) pathway offer a promising route for decarbonizing the aviation sector, yet systematic comparisons across multiple process configurations remain scarce, and detailed kinetic modelling of alternative upgrading strategies such as Guerbet coupling are largely absent from the literature. This work presents an Aspen Plus based Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) of one MtJ (P1) and two EtJ pathways being conventional EtJ (P2) and Guerbet-coupling-based EtJ (P3). Defined scenarios investigate the influence of oligomerization product distribution, recycle configurations, and off-gas utilization on the Net Production Costs (NPC) and key technical performance indicators, including carbon, PtL and global efficiency, and Specific Energy Consumption (SEC). Results show that the conventional EtJ pathway P2 achieves the lowest production costs (2.5-3.7 EUR kg-1), followed by the Guerbet-based route P3 (3.8-4 EUR kg-1), while MtJ P1 exhibits the highest costs (3.5-5.2 EUR kg-1) despite the lowest SEC. Feedstock costs dominate the overall production costs across all pathways, while the oligomerization section holds large technical potential for improving overall process performance. Both EtJ pathways achieve substantially higher carbon efficiencies (51-56%) than MtJ (38-50%), due to carbon losses to methane, CO and aromatics in the Methanol-to-Olefins (MtO) conversion as well as lower selectivity towards kerosene range hydrocarbons (HC) in the single-stage co-oligomerization step. While the Guerbet-based route shows competitive simulated costs relative to MtJ, the limited experimental database for this pathway introduces considerable uncertainty, highlighting key research needs for future development and process validation.

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