Promote sustainable aviation fuel development to help civil aviation green recovery

With the development of the economy and the changes in people's travel concepts, in long -distance transportation and traffic, aviation transportation has become the first choice for more and more people, and it plays an irreplaceable role in the development of the market economy. From the perspective of the industrial chain, the upstream of the civil aviation transportation industry is the aircraft manufacturing industry. The downstream involves people's livelihood travel, citizens' lives, and connecting hotels, catering, scenic spots and other industries, which has a prominent role in the economy. However, the depth and continuity of the impact of the new crown pneumonia's epidemic on civil aviation transportation far exceed expectations. Since 2022, the epidemic point, wide and frequent, and the prevention and control of my country's epidemic is facing complex and severe tests. As of March 2022, the entire civil aviation industry loses losses. Among them, airlines have a large amount of losses and have been listed as a special plenty of industries by the State Council.

With the repeated epidemic and the overall predicament of the industry, the civil aviation industry in my country has successively introduced a package of countermeasures for enterprises to relieve difficulties and promote the development of the industry to restore the development and stable development. As the impact of the epidemic is gradually eliminated, the Chinese civil aviation department has never stopped thinking about how to do a good job of carbon emission reduction. In January 2022, the Civil Aviation Administration of China issued the "Special Plan for the Green Development of the" Fourteenth Five -Year Plan "Civil Aviation Civil Aviation", which clearly proposed that it is necessary to achieve the realization of carbon peaks, carbon neutrality and goals. Green transformation. This urgently requires the efforts and breakthroughs of Chinese civil aviation in the post -epidemic era, to find the focus of carbon emission reduction, and do a good job of low -carbon emission reduction while achieving the recovery of the industry.

At present, although civil aviation is not a large carbon emission household, it is a "difficult household" of carbon reduction, and the spearhead directly points to fossil fuel. With the rapid development of the aviation transportation industry, the power devices of large civil aviation passenger aircraft are gradually replaced by turbine jet engines. The fuel used is called jet fuel. Since the current production and widely used jet fuel belongs to kerosene types, it is usually called aviation kerosene. Industry research data shows that aviation kerosene burning is the direct cause of carbon emissions of civil aviation, and the produced carbon dioxide accounts for about 80%of the total carbon emissions of civil aviation. In summary, the most efficient approach to realizing the green recovery in the civil aviation industry is to make articles in aviation fuel replacement.

At present, aviation energy replacement solutions are widely studied and highly feasible in the world, there are three ways: electrification, hydrogen energy, and sustainable aviation fuel.

The most prominent advantage of electrification and hydrogen energy aircraft is high efficiency, low energy consumption, close to zero carbon emissions, and is a veritable environment -friendly aircraft. However, for electricized aircraft, the maximum technical challenge is that the key performance indicators of the electric power promotion system are low and the weight is too large, which can only meet the minimum requirements of electric aircraft. In addition, the practicality, security and reliability of the electric power promotion system also need to be improved. For hydrogen energy aircraft, its main deficiency is that the unit volume storage density is low, and flammable and explosion causes difficulties in storage and transportation. Therefore, from a technical perspective, electrification and hydrogen energy can be difficult to achieve significant progress in the short period of medium and medium in the short period, and provide effective help for civil aviation carbon emission reduction.

Different from electrification and hydrogen energy, sustainable aviation fuel belongs to kerosene fuel, which is synthesized by alternative and renewable energy. The raw materials include vegetable oil, algae, oil, animal fat, waste water, etc. Its advantage can be summarized as the following four aspects: active effects, using the entire life cycle as the calculation benchmark, sustainable aviation fuel can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80%; technology is mature. So far, more than 300,000 flights have been used to use this so far Specific fuel; convenient use, no need to improve aircraft engines, existing facilities can support allocation and storage, and no additional complicated operations of the airport; durable and durable, all raw materials used to produce sustainable aviation fuels come from sustainable energy. Therefore, from the perspective of technology and existing business applications, sustainable aviation fuel may be the most important way to achieve the target of civil aviation carbon emission reduction in the short -term. Many countries have regarded sustainable aviation fuel as their focus.

In recent years, sustainable aviation fuel has made certain breakthroughs in my country, but has not yet achieved large -scale commercial applications. The main obstacles to restrict sustainable aviation fuels are not technical bottlenecks, but price constraints and capacity constraints. At this stage, the cost of sustainable aviation fuel production in my country is 2-5 times higher than that of traditional fuel, and the enthusiasm of airlines using sustainable aviation fuel is not high. In addition, some raw materials have high costs and insufficient supply. The size of the market with small raw materials has made sustainable aviation fuel development more insufficient.

In order to promote the green recovery of my country ’s civil aviation, multi -channel force is needed to accelerate the development of my country's sustainable aviation fuel industry. The first is to encourage the development of sustainable aviation fuel industry chain. It can be considered to consider the measures such as tax cuts, subsidies, and loans to support sustainable aviation fuel research and development and the construction of demonstration factories. Other policies can also be implemented to reduce investment risks of related industries. The second is to encourage the promotion and application of sustainable aviation fuels. It can consider the cost difference between fossil aviation fuel and sustainable aviation fuel by considering competitive pricing, promote the increase in the amount of sustainable aviation fuel, and further expand market demand. The third is to accelerate the establishment of an aviation fuel sustainable certification system, and make every effort to promote the construction of sustainable aviation fuel airline check -in system and guarantee mechanism.

(Author: Wang Qunwei Liu Xiao Zhou Dequn This article is a phased research result of the National Social Science Foundation (21 & ZD110); author unit: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics University Energy Soft Science Research Center)

Review: Pan Ruikai

Editor in charge: Xu Luping

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