'Plastic trash is now a low-cost aircraft fuel'

Plastic waste can now be converted directly into usable jet fuel

A tandem reactor system breaks plastic down at 460 degrees Celsius

Ruthenium catalyst sites delivered far better selectivity than commercial alternatives

Researchers at Nanjing Forestry University and Tsinghua University have demonstrated a new method for converting plastic waste directly into usable jet fuel, with estimated production costs ranging from $1.0 to $1.8 per kilogram.

The work comes as airlines, governments, and fuel producers continue searching for alternatives that could reduce dependence on conventional fossil-derived jet fuel.

While the technology remains under further development, the researchers say their approach combines favourable fuel characteristics with economics that appear competitive on paper.

New reactor design turns waste plastic into aviation fuel

The study, published in Nature Energy, shows a tandem reactor system using hydro-pyrolysis and hydrogenolysis can convert plastic waste into jet-fuel-range hydrocarbons.

The researchers note plastic material first enters a reactor operating at 460 °C, where it is broken into smaller molecular compounds.

Those intermediate products then pass into a second stage operating at 160 °C, where a specially designed catalyst converts them into cycloalkane-rich aviation fuel suitable for further evaluation.

Professors Yadong Li and Dingsheng Wang explained that controlling the final product mix had long remained a challenge in plastic conversion research.

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“The problem that kept pulling us back was selectivity,” they said, noting that conventional approaches often produce broad and difficult-to-control distributions of chemical products.

The team concentrated on atomically dispersed ruthenium, or Ru, sites supported on cobalt-aluminum oxide materials.

After evaluating multiple catalyst configurations, they found that isolated Ru sites delivered significantly different reaction behaviour compared with conventional alternatives.

They reported that the catalyst achieved hydrogenation performance more than 100 times greater than a commercial Ru/C catalyst during a key processing stage.

Economics and sustainability claims draw attention

The study arrives amid continuing efforts to expand sustainable aviation fuel production as airlines face pressure to lower emissions.

Aviation remains one of the more difficult sectors to decarbonize because aircraft require energy-dense liquid fuels that can operate under demanding flight conditions.

The group also reported successful catalyst preparation and testing at gram scale, while stating that both catalyst manufacturing and hydrogenation processes appear capable of scaling further.

The researchers said the resulting fuel demonstrated attractive performance characteristics while also offering potentially favourable economics.

“A techno-economic analysis put the competitive minimum selling price at $1.0–1.8 per kilogram,” Li and Wang said, describing the estimate as competitive.

For comparison, conventional fossil-based jet fuel currently costs roughly $1.00–$1.30 per kilogram, although prices change with global oil markets and refinery conditions.

Given the volatility tied to global oil markets, the conflict in Iran, and tensions across other oil-producing regions, a price-competitive alternative becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

Future work will focus on kilogram-scale catalyst production and continuous feeding systems intended to improve operational efficiency.

Via Techxplore

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