Hawaiian Airlines signed a five-year agreement with biofuel manufacturer Gevo, Inc. to buy 50 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Gevo anticipates supplying the SAF from a factory to be built in the Midwestern United States, with supplies to Hawaiian’s gateway towns in California beginning in 2029.
The GREET model developed by Argonne National Laboratory examines the greenhouse gas life cycle impacts of fuels from feedstock to combustion.
Gevo will make SAF from leftover starch from inedible field maize developed with regenerative agricultural principles. In addition, renewable energy and renewable natural gas will be used in the manufacturing process, resulting in low-carbon fuels with significantly lower carbon intensity (the level of greenhouse gas emissions compared to standard petroleum fossil-based fuels across their life cycle).
Gevo’s technique is designed to optimise value and minimise waste by producing both animal feed and renewable energy on the same acre of farmland while sequestering atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis.
The fuel sales agreement is conditional on Gevo developing, financing, and constructing the plant to generate the SAF specified under the agreement.
“This offtake agreement gets us one step closer to achieving our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050,” said Hawaiian’s president and CEO, Peter Ingram. “We intend to continue to invest in SAF, which will be pivotal in reducing our impact on the environment.”
“Gevo is pleased to welcome Hawaiian Airlines to our customer family of airlines that are working hard to achieve their net zero goals,” said Gevo CEO Dr. Patrick Gruber. “By counting all of the carbon, analyzed using Argonne’s GREET (Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation) method, we are working to help airlines realize these goals.”
