LOW LUC RISK BIOMASS POTENTIAL ON DEGRADED PASTURELAND FOR SUSTAINABLE AVIATION FUEL PRODUCTION IN BRAZIL

Following climate change concerns and sustainable alternatives to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has been assessed for use in the aviation sector. Considering the concerns regarding land use change (LUC) due to biomass expansion, and the hypothesis that Brazil has a large potential to produce eligible SAF, this work aimed to map and quantify the potential of Brazilian biomass and SAF’s production on degraded pastureland following CORSIA’s low LUC risk criteria. Therefore, spatially explicit attainable yield from crop growth modeling was combined with land availability and SAF yields from ICAO. The results showed that there are 79.3 million hectares of degraded pastureland in the country that was not converted from native vegetation after 2008 and that has been degraded for at least five years, being possibly eligible for SAF production in CORSIA’s low LUC risk framework under the unused land approach. Alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) pathway using sugarcane and maize, and hydro processed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) pathway using soybean oil were estimated on this total degraded area and could produce up to 322.7 billion liters of SAF, with ATJ from sugarcane providing the best potential in almost all mesoregions of the country. Results highlight the large potential for SAF production in Brazil following CORSIA’s Low LUC risk eligibility criteria, and these mapped areas using remote sensing evidences the most likely regions to be certified as Low LUC risk for SAF production in the country.