BioVeritas , LLC, a leading sustainable fuels and biochemicals company, is committed to redefining the future of sustainable aviation fuels (‘SAF’). The company announced on 25 October that it will launch the BioVeritas Process™ for SAF. This breakthrough technology converts biomass through fermentation into volatile fatty acids (VFA), a key precursor for a range of high-value products, particularly SAF. The company, then known as Terrabon, began exploring sustainable fuels fifteen years ago, long before the term ‘SAF’ became mainstream. Since then, BioVeritas has significantly advanced the technology, particularly in fermentation product distribution and acid recovery at its Market Demonstration Unit in Bryan, Texas, where the BioVeritas Process, when applied to SAF, unlocks more feedstocks and uses less energy to deliver a jet fuel with superior carbon intensity. These capabilities free the platform from some of the key constraints facing the SAF industry and give BioVeritas unlimited growth potential.
SAF from the BioVeritas Process™ consists of three steps: directed mixed fermentation for volatile fatty acid (VFA) production, low-energy acid recovery and VFA-SAF conversion. First, directed mixed fermentation converts a variety of abundant feedstocks, ranging from speciality crops to agricultural residues and waste streams, into a controlled and proportionally adjustable mixture of volatile fatty acids. This control is achieved by directing the physiology and ecology of the microorganisms in the mixed culture. Second, low energy acid recovery is achieved by BioVeritas’ proprietary extraction process and efficient water recovery. These features combine to minimise distillation and evaporation requirements, which typically generate high energy consumption in other processes. Finally, the VFA-SAF step converts long-chain volatile fatty acids to SAF through ketonisation, hydrodeoxygenation and isomerisation, the latter two processes being those used in the commercially proven HEFA/HVO process.