Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) based on crop residues such as corn stover or perennial bioenergy crops such as miscanthus or switchgrass have the potential to mitigate carbon (C) emissions. However, SAF production scale-up is hindered by high establishment costs, establishment lags, and yield and price riskiness, making the return profiles for SAF feedstocks less appealing to risk-averse, present-biased, and credit-constrained farmers.
Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) developed an economic model incorporating spatially varying joint yield and price distributions for multiple farmer crop choices and applied it to examine the incentives for risk-averse, present-biased, and credit-constrained farmers to produce cellulosic feedstocks under various biomass prices. They quantified the spatially varying C mitigation benefits from these feedstocks in the U.S. rainfed region to compute SAF production and spatial patterns of feedstock adoption under annual and upfront C payment policies.
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