From Concept to Commercialization: NREL's Sustainable Aviation Fuels Program

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) supports the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) with fundamental and applied research, development, and deployment (RD&D) designed to advance technologies to produce biobased energy, fuels, chemicals, and products from initial conception to demonstration stages. NREL's program is organized along six Science and Technology (S&T) Research Platforms, focused on Pretreatment and Biological Conversion of biomass feed, Catalytic Conversion of biomass feed or intermediate streams, co-product Polymers and Bioproducts production, Lignin Valorization, Waste Gas Valorization, and Algae Biofuels and Bioproducts. Supporting these S&T Platforms is a Crosscutting Strategic and Sustainability Analysis Platform, which provides process economics and sustainability metrics to help determine S&T research priorities. Projects in each of the S&T Platform are integrated into Feedstock -to- Product 'Pathways' that support the DOE SAF and Materials & Chemicals/CO2 reduction goals. The technology pathways are deployed through the Market Impact Platform in collaboration with industry partners and other stakeholders.