Sustainable Fuels
Sustainable Fuels
Fueling Change: Decarbonizing Heavy Transport With Sustainable Fossil Fuel Alternatives
Planes, ships, and long-haul trucks keep the global economy moving — but they burn fossil fuels to do it. Heavy transport generates more than half of all transportation emissions, and electrification of the largest vehicles would require batteries with a power density that doesn’t exist yet. Sustainable fuels offer an alternative route: substitutes made from low-carbon resources or with clean electricity that can power existing engines while slashing lifecycle emissions. From biofuels produced from algae to e-fuels synthesized using green hydrogen, these technologies have the potential to decarbonize the hardest-to-electrify sectors without requiring a total overhaul of vehicles or infrastructure. If scaled quickly and if costs come down, sustainable fuels could replace a significant share of petroleum use, cut billions of tons of CO₂ each year — and keep the world moving toward a more climate-friendly future.
Emissions at stake in 2050: 9.4 Gigatons
Innovation Imperatives
Innovation Imperatives
Critical needs that can help accelerate the path to net zero
Alternative Fuel Production
Establish low-emissions manufacturing methods for SAF, ammonia, methanol, aromatics, olefins, and other fuels
There are three pathways for sustainable fuels to fully decarbonize heavy industry and transport. We must find ways to produce existing fuels without emissions; create drop-in, low-carbon replacements for current fuels; and develop new fuels, along with the engines and infrastructure they’ll need. All pathways depend on pioneering novel routes (e.g., catalytic, electrochemical, or biological) that can efficiently build these high-value molecules from clean carbon and hydrogen. Mastering these advanced synthesis methods is critical for creating clean replacements for the foundational components of high-performance fuels and industrial chemicals — and for tackling some of our economy’s most stubborn sources of emissions.
Low-Cost Carbon and Hydrogen
Develop clean, low-cost, and scalable sources of carbon and hydrogen
Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons, meaning they’re a combination of hydrogen and carbon. The sustainable fuels that replace them will be made up of the same dynamic building blocks. Creating sustainable fuels depends on abundant, low-emissions sources of both carbon and hydrogen — but today, clean supply is constrained and costly. Innovations in biomass aggregation, CO₂ capture, electrolysis, and the exploration of natural hydrogen reserves could unlock the feedstocks necessary for the large-scale production of e-fuels, biofuels, and hydrogen-based fuels. Achieving a low-cost, scalable supply of carbon and hydrogen is critical to making sustainable fuels competitive and deployable across aviation, shipping, and heavy transport.
Scalable Biofuels
Advance cost-competitive production methods that don't compete with food production
Biofuels can help cut emissions in hard-to-electrify transport, but challenges remain: in particular, finding pathways that can cost-effectively scale to meet a meaningful share of global fuel demand. High-productivity, non-food sources — such as algae cultivation and other advanced feedstocks — offer potential routes forward. Breakthroughs in process efficiency, feedstock aggregation, and cost will be critical for biofuels to scale sustainably, enabling them to decarbonize aviation, shipping, and long-haul trucking without straining food, land, or water resources.
Waste-to-Value
Utilize waste streams to create synthetic hydrocarbons
Our economy generates vast streams of carbon-based waste — from agricultural residues to municipal trash — that typically end up in landfills, while we simultaneously extract fossil fuels to produce the hydrocarbons for our fuels and chemicals. But what if we could leverage those waste streams? The key technical need is to scale up advanced conversion processes (like gasification and pyrolysis), which can break down diverse waste streams and chemically reassemble them into high-value synthetic hydrocarbons, such as sustainable aviation fuel or the building blocks for plastics. This transforms a costly waste-disposal problem into a useful feedstock, simultaneously cutting landfill emissions and displacing the need for fossil fuel extraction.
Tech Categories
Tech Categories
Groupings of climate technologies
| Cluster Name | Readiness | |
|---|---|---|
| Alternative Fuel Infrastructure | Pilot | |
Alternative fuel infrastructure encompasses the specialized network of fueling stations, hydrogen pipelines, biofuel tankers, and storage facilities that will deliver sustainable fuels from production sites to the vehicles themselves. | ||
| Biofuels | Commercial | |
Biofuels are liquid fuels derived from organic materials, including crops, agricultural waste, and algae. | ||
| Hydrogen & Derivatives | Pilot | |
Hydrogen and derivatives, including ammonia and methanol, can power fuel cell vehicles with few emissions. | ||
| Synthetic E-fuels | Pilot | |
Synthetic e-fuels are created by combining chemicals, including green hydrogen, to produce fuels that are chemically identical to conventional gasoline or diesel but with a much smaller or net-zero carbon footprint. |
View all Tech Categories
