Addressing the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge: Economic and Environmental Insights from Feedstock Optimization

This study assesses the potential for purpose-grown bioenergy feedstocks to meet the United States Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge targets. A combined life cycle assessment, techno-economic analysis, geospatial modeling, and evolutionary optimization framework was applied to evaluate the county-level deployment of nine feedstocks across seven land classifications. The findings underscore critical trade-offs between land use, fuel production costs, and emissions reductions in achieving national SAF targets. In cost-optimized scenarios, sorghum and miscanthus comprise most of the production (together >95%), achieving minimum fuel selling prices as low as $3.24 gallon–1. Cultivation land-minimizing scenarios favor algae exclusively, reducing land use to 0.5% of the contiguous U.S., but with higher fuel prices and emissions. Emissions-optimized scenarios are largely composed of miscanthus (>99%), achieving life-cycle emissions below 5 gCO2-eq MJ–1. The breakeven carbon price optimized scenarios deploy a mix of miscanthus (86%), sorghum (13%), and soy (1%); balancing low fuel cost and emissions with a breakeven carbon price of $161 tCO2-eq–1. Across all cases, feedstock yields, biomass-to-fuel conversion efficiencies, and spatial heterogeneity strongly influence feasibility. These results highlight the importance of coordinated optimization strategies to enable cost-effective, low-carbon SAF production and support efforts to inform energy policy, supply chain planning, and commercialization pathways.