Sora Fuel secures $6m to produce SAF
Sora Fuel, a startup producing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) using only water, air and renewable energy, has raised an oversubscribed $6 million seed round.
The Engine Ventures led the round, with Wireframe Ventures and others participating. The funding will be used to expand Sora Fuel’s Boston-based team, develop commercialisation partnerships and further advance the company’s novel technology.
Aviation emissions have quadrupled since the 1960s, with aircraft currently accounting for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions and approximately 4% of global warming.
As demand for air travel continues to surge, SAF will play a crucial role in decarbonising this hard-to-abate sector. However, existing SAF production processes are fundamentally constrained, requiring vast amounts of energy, feedstocks and investment to make a meaningful impact.
For example, today’s only commercially viable SAF, the Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) process relies on limited waste oil feedstock that alone can cost $3.50 per gallon, while the alcohol-to-jet process competes with agriculture and leads to soil degradation.
Waste gasification and point-source power-to-liquid processes are less reliant on valuable resources, however both provide limited greenhouse gas reduction potential, as the underlying feedstocks of both processes contain / rely on non-biogenic sources of carbon.
Sora Fuel offers a new path for producing SAF by capturing and using atmospheric CO2 at costs that are an order of magnitude lower than existing processes.
The company’s novel technology includes a liquid bicarbonate electrolyser that delivers direct air capture (DAC) CO2 at just $20 per ton, operating in a fully closed-loop system that uses only water and renewable electricity to produce syngas.
Compared to incumbent DAC solutions, Sora Fuel’s DAC-to-fuels approach dramatically reduces overall energy inputs, eliminates the need for feedstocks (other than air and water), and provides a scalable process for efficiently and cost effectively producing SAF and any other downstream products of syngas.
“Sora Fuel’s technology eliminates 90% of the energy currently required in standard DAC processes, opening up an entirely new and more sustainable path for producing carbon negative fuels,” said Gareth Ross, co-founder and CEO of Sora Fuel.
“Our patented, closed-loop system enables the direct generation of an economical product and overcomes widespread feedstock constraints, allowing us to produce SAF at prices comparable to current Jet A fuel.”
“There’s no path to meeting our climate goals without managing to reduce the carbon intensity of aviation. Fuels are the backbone of that sector because of their energy density, and decarbonising fuels requires new pathways for capturing and utilising CO2 to scalably produce SAF,” added Michael Kearney, General Partner at Engine Ventures and Sora Fuel Board member.
“The company’s innovative electrolyser technology will enable the operation of highly profitable SAF plants that are unconstrained by location – a crucial feature considering that 500 million metric tons of SAF are needed by 2050 to meet the global aviation industry’s environmental targets.”
