Aviation is considered a hard-to-abate sector—one where reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is particularly challenging—and existing strategies to decarbonize aviation rely heavily on replacing fossil jet fuel with alternative aviation fuel (often called sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF).

There is growing interest in producing SAF from agricultural residues, which can be a climate-friendly biomass feedstock option when harvested responsibly. Residue-based fuels stand in contrast to conventional biofuels made from food and feed crops, like corn and soy, which require large areas of arable land, raising concerns about their global impacts on food prices, deforestation, and GHG emissions. Synthetic fuel made from hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide (known as electrofuel, or e-fuel) is another option to decrease net aviation emissions. Despite the emissions and land use concerns, the United States’ current policies incentivize conventional, food crop–based SAFs to help bolster the domestic agricultural economy. Meanwhile, there has been little research into the economic benefits that a residue-based or e-fuel SAF industry could provide.

This paper explores the potential benefits of building a residue-based or e-fuel SAF or CDR industry in the Midwestern United States, commonly referred to as the Corn Belt. It examines relevant SAF and CDR technologies that utilize resources that are abundant in the region, like corn stover, the stalks, leaves, husks, cobs and other cellulosic material left behind after corn harvest. This paper uses input-output economic modeling to assess the gross economic impacts that a 3-billion-gallon per year residue-based or e-fuel SAF and CDR industry could bring to the Corn Belt.

Key Findings

  • Certain SAF and CDR technologies can take advantage of resources that are plentiful in the US Midwest, particularly corn stover. These technologies include:
    • alcohol-to-jet (AtJ)
    • Fischer-Tropsch (FT) 
    • power- and biomass-to-liquid (PBtL) 
    • power-to-liquid (PtL) 
    • pyrolsis for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) 
  • Replacing three billion gallons of jet fuel could be achieved with between 18 and 89 million tons of stover, within sustainable limits of corn stover supply (estimated at 90 million tons). 
  • If airlines were required to replace three billion gallons of jet fuel with SAF or CDR, adoption of these technologies in the Midwest could support as many as 99,000–214,000 jobs, $7 billion–$15 billion in labor income, $9 billion–$32 billion in value to regional GDP, and $4 billion–$10 billion in tax revenue each year. 
  • While the regional economic benefits of a residue-based SAF industry could be substantial, policy support would be vital to develop these technologies and understand which ones will ultimately be able to scale.