When people ask us what bio-oil is actually used for, sustainable aviation fuel is the answer that surprises them most. They expect us to say heating oil or industrial boiler fuel. But the highest-value pathway for pyrolysis bio-oil — and the one drawing the most investment right now — is upgrading it into drop-in jet fuel.
We're a pyrolysis company, not an airline or a refinery. But our position in the SAF supply chain matters more than most people realize. The bottleneck for aviation decarbonization isn't refining technology. It's feedstock. Specifically, it's getting enough biomass-derived intermediates to the refineries that can turn them into jet fuel. That's exactly what we do at iNBIO.
Why Aviation Can't Just Go Electric
A fully loaded 787 burns through about 5,400 gallons of jet fuel per hour. The energy density of kerosene is roughly 50 times that of the best lithium-ion batteries by weight. You can electrify a delivery van. You cannot electrify a transatlantic flight. Not with current physics.
That's not pessimism. That's thermodynamics.
Hydrogen has theoretical promise, but it requires completely new aircraft designs, new fueling infrastructure at every airport, and new safety protocols. Realistically, we're talking 2045 or later for any meaningful hydrogen-powered commercial aviation. The industry knows this. That's why every major airline decarbonization strategy centers on SAF — sustainable aviation fuel that works in today's engines, today's fuel trucks, and today's airport infrastructure.
The numbers tell the story of how far behind production is: global SAF output covers less than 0.2% of jet fuel demand. Airlines have committed to net-zero by 2050. The EU is mandating 2% SAF blending starting in 2025, rising to 70% by 2050. ICAO's CORSIA program requires airlines to offset emissions on international routes, and SAF use counts directly toward compliance. U.S. federal tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act offered $1.25–$1.75 per gallon for SAF production.
The demand signal is massive and growing. The supply isn't there yet.
What SAF Actually Is
SAF is jet fuel made from renewable or waste-derived feedstocks instead of crude oil. The critical word is “drop-in” — it meets the same ASTM D7566 specification as petroleum Jet A/A-1. No engine modifications. No infrastructure changes. Pilots don't even know the difference.
Lifecycle greenhouse gas reductions range from 50–80% compared to fossil jet fuel, depending on the feedstock and production pathway. The carbon in SAF came from biomass that recently pulled CO2from the atmosphere, so burning it doesn't add net carbon the way burning 100-million-year-old petroleum does.
From Woodchips to Jet Fuel: The Four-Step Pathway
There are seven ASTM-approved routes to SAF. The one most relevant to our work is the hydrotreated pyrolysis oil pathway, which takes bio-oil produced by fast pyrolysis and upgrades it into specification-grade jet fuel. We operate in Steps 1 and 2. Steps 3 and 4 happen at specialized upgrading refineries.
Step 1: Fast Pyrolysis — Turning Biomass into Bio-Oil
Wood residues, forestry slash, agricultural waste — we take these feedstocks and process them in our fast pyrolysis reactors at 450–550°C in an oxygen-free environment. The biomass thermally decomposes in under 2 seconds. The vapors are rapidly condensed into bio-oil, with biochar and syngas as co-products.
Bio-oil captures 40–70% of the energy in the original biomass and concentrates it into a pumpable liquid. One truckload of bio-oil carries the energy equivalent of roughly 15–20 truckloads of raw woodchips. That ratio is everything in this supply chain.
Step 2: Stabilization and Transport
Raw bio-oil needs stabilization before it ships. It's acidic and reactive — if you leave it sitting at high temperature, it polymerizes and thickens over time. We've learned through our own operations that proper quenching and storage protocols make the difference between bio-oil that arrives at the refinery ready to process and bio-oil that's turned into a headache.
Once stabilized, bio-oil moves by standard tanker truck, rail car, or barge. This is the step where distributed pyrolysis earns its keep: we can ship a dense liquid hundreds of miles economically, something that is completely impractical with bulky raw biomass.
Step 3: Catalytic Upgrading
At the refinery, bio-oil goes through catalytic hydrotreating. Hydrogen is added under high pressure and temperature with specialized catalysts. This strips the oxygen out of the bio-oil molecules, cracks larger chains, and converts the oxygenated organics into conventional hydrocarbons — diesel-range, gasoline-range, and kerosene-range molecules.
We don't do this step ourselves. Upgrading requires refinery-scale capital, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. But we talk regularly with the companies building these facilities, and the question they ask us most often is simple: “Can you guarantee feedstock supply?” The answer to that question is what makes or breaks a refinery project's financing.
Step 4: Fractionation and Blending
The upgraded hydrocarbon stream gets distilled to separate the jet fuel fraction from diesel and gasoline cuts. The SAF fraction is tested against ASTM D7566, blended with conventional jet fuel (currently approved up to 50% blend ratios for most pathways), certified, and delivered to airports through the same fuel trucks and hydrant systems already in use.
Nobody at the gate knows the plane is running on partially renewable fuel. That's the whole point.
Why Distributed Pyrolysis Is the Missing Piece
The SAF supply chain has a fundamental mismatch: biomass is scattered across the landscape in low-density piles, but upgrading refineries need massive, concentrated volumes of feedstock to justify their capital costs. You can't profitably truck woodchips 200 miles to a refinery. The math doesn't work.
We've run the transport economics ourselves. Hauling raw wood chips costs $15–$30 per ton, and beyond about 50–75 miles, freight costs eat up whatever margin the biomass had. Bio-oil transport, on the other hand, is 15–20 times more cost-effective per unit of energy moved. A single tanker truck of bio-oil replaces a convoy of chip trucks.
This is iNBIO's thesis: put small pyrolysis plants — our systems handle 5–75 tons per day — at the points where biomass waste is generated. Sawmills. Lumber yards. Agricultural processors. Each plant converts local waste into bio-oil, and that bio-oil feeds into a regional upgrading refinery. No 300-mile chip hauls. No multi-billion-dollar integrated biorefinery that has to source all its feedstock from a single region.
The distributed model also reduces supply chain risk. A refinery depending on one giant biomass source is vulnerable to drought, wildfire, or a single supplier's business problems. A network of 10 or 15 smaller pyrolysis plants, each drawing on different local feedstocks, is far more resilient.
The Co-Product Advantage
One thing that makes the pyrolysis-to-SAF pathway economically interesting compared to other SAF routes: it produces biochar alongside the bio-oil.
Biochar has its own revenue streams — soil amendment sales, carbon credit generation, industrial applications. When we run the economics on a pyrolysis plant, the biochar and syngas co-products can cover 30–40% of operating costs. That makes the bio-oil cheaper to produce than it would be from a system that only makes liquid fuel.
There's a carbon sequestration angle too. When biochar goes into soil, that carbon stays locked up for hundreds to thousands of years. A pyrolysis-plus-SAF pathway where the biochar is sequestered can actually achieve net-negative lifecycle emissions. Not just carbon-neutral. Carbon-negative. That's a rare claim in the energy sector, and the carbon credit market is starting to price it accordingly.
How Big Is This Market?
Global aviation burns roughly 350 billion liters of jet fuel per year. SAF currently supplies less than a billion liters of that. Industry roadmaps call for SAF to reach 10% of supply by 2030 — roughly a 50x increase from current production. IATA's net-zero pathway envisions SAF at 65% of total jet fuel by 2050, a market worth over $200 billion annually.
Major oil companies, airlines, and private equity firms have committed tens of billions to SAF production facilities. Those facilities will need feedstock. Bio-oil from distributed pyrolysis is one of the few intermediate products that can scale fast enough to fill the gap, because our plants can be deployed in 12–18 months, not 5–7 years like a greenfield refinery.
What iNBIO Is Doing About It
We're not waiting for the SAF market to mature before positioning ourselves. We're actively working with our modular pyrolysis systems to produce bio-oil that meets the specifications upgrading refineries require. We're in conversations with refinery developers about long-term offtake agreements. And we're scouting locations for distributed pyrolysis deployments near concentrated biomass sources on the Eastern Seaboard, where our proximity to both forestry resources and refining infrastructure gives us a logistics advantage.
For sawmill operators, agricultural processors, and forestry managers sitting on piles of biomass waste, this represents something new: a buyer for material you're currently paying to get rid of. The SAF market turns that cost center into a revenue stream.
If you're generating biomass waste and want to understand what it's worth as SAF feedstock, talk to us. Explore our biofuels portfolio or take a look at how our pyrolysis technology works. We'll run the numbers with you.