‘Woods-to-Wake’ Life Cycle Assessment of residual woody biomass based jet-fuel using mild bisulfite pretreatment

Abstract The residual woody biomass (a.k.a. harvest slash) produced during forest harvest operations in the Pacific Northwest is generally collected into piles and burned and/or left on the forest floor to decompose. Producing drop-in biofuels from this residual cellulosic feedstock can provide an alternative use for this unused resource while simultaneously displacing petroleum based fuels. Utilizing a ‘Woods-to-Wake’ (WoTW) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, which is comparable to a Well-to-Wake (WTW) LCA for petroleum based aviation fuel, this paper assesses the environmental implications of feedstock recovery, production, and utilization of residual woody biomass based biojet fuel. This paper also presents a comparative assessment of the environmental implications of substituting petroleum based jet fuel with that of residual woody biomass based biojet fuel. The bioconversion process presented in this paper uses a mild bisulfite pre-treatment of the feedstock to liberate the C5 and C6 sugars which then go through enzymatic hydrolysis and saccharification to produce fermentable sugars. The sugars are then converted to bio-jet fuel (iso-paraffinic kerosene, IPK) using a proprietary biocatalytic fermentation and oligomerization process. The WoTW environmental implications of producing woody biomass based jet-fuel are then compared to the WTW environmental impacts of producing petroleum based jet-fuel. The results reveal that the WoTW global warming impact of residual wood based bio-jet fuel represents a 78% improvement over the WTW global warming impact of petroleum-based jet fuel.