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Crude oil is only a tiny part of the total price of Jet A. Today at the KADS FBO Jet A is $6.50 a gal. 100LL petrol is $8.65.

https://www.globalair.com/airport/apt.compare.aspx?aptcode=ads

The refinery gate whole sale price for Feb 24 is $2.65 a gallon. The difference be refinery price and the at airport FBO price is all wholesale plus FBO markup,taxes,and transport costs. You can see that production cost is 1/3 the final price. So if this group for lignin fuel into the $3_4 range it is cost competitive to jetA today. The March futures market price for refinery gate whole sale jet fuel is $3.28.

Lignin is the most abundant plant polymer on earth after cellulose it makes up 30 to 50% or vascular land plants total mass. The added bonus is lignin is a cyclic polymer so when it is broken into basic carbon units it forms aromatic rings these are critical in jet fuels as they have very low freeze and gel points every jet fuel standard on earth has minimum aromatic percentages SAF until now has not been able to make aromatics and this could only be 50/50 blended with lignin based fuels you can go to 100% SAF that’s denser by volume a plus for aircraft and have zero sulfur a plus for all of us who breathe air. Sox forms acid rain and smog and at high altitudes acts as a potent cooling agent for the planet plus has a nasty habit of eating ozone which we need as well.

There is more than enough lignin produced in the world to fuel all of aviation at its current rates of consumption this is important from a long term resource depletion case. Liquid hydrocarbons have 50 years at most and a lot less when not if Asia, Africa,and India demand middle class energy consumption levels that’s at $300 and under in 2024 dollars.

I have spend the better part of 20 years looking, drilling,production,and geochemical analysis for total hydrocarbon systems on 6 of 7 continents as a multidegree holding geologist,geochemist,and hydrogeo. 50 years is not a lot of time to make a transition to other fuels. Do not confuse climate commies and their political masters power grab latched on to co2 for a very real and tangibly calculatable end of the cheap oil era. Oil is finite and no it is not abiotic never once at any AAPG,SEG,USGS,IEA or any other peer reviewed scientific research community or society has any scientists ever presented and successfully defended abiotic oil. Even if they did it’s production and accumulation timelines are on geological time scales meaningless to human time. We humans have depleted 400 million years of fossil sunshine in under 200 there is no process known or theorized to put back what we have used in such a short two century time scale.

So the fact is we need to look long term for a species with 8+ billion heading to ten billion souls every one of which is demanding middle class energy consumption levels. The ONLY sources that can do that is fast spectrum nuclear power, solar electrics and synfuels in arid deserts, and biofuels from nonfood lands with wastes from food production being a few billion tonnes per year. Ocean farming will be needed as will desert coastal areas via salt water agriculture. The oceans and kelp,algae,sea grasses, and plankton grown in floating bags or pens opens up 75% more area for solar output capture which is what hydrocarbons really are. They are the fossil carbon remains of long dead algae,plankton and diatoms in salt water basis or very large freshwater post glacial lakes. Every oil I have EVER geochem had chemical signatures and isotope markers for fossil sunshine and microbiological life sources every single one. The very rare cases are coal based oils these occur in rare cases since coals TOC is usually above 12% they are outside the petroleum window geologically. Very poor coals and peats that pass through the petro window temps and pressures make distinct oils with high aromatics and tars the geochem screams coal it’s loaded with chlorophyll derivatives and phenols. Point is no one has come to the community with an oil sample that doesn’t have the markers of being from the prehistoric biosphere none of it is mantle based carbon or their distinctive isotope ratios. There is some mantle methane and gold hydrogen that shows carbon sources of carbonate rocks being subducted into the mantle and the water chemically bound to the minerals being heated by the mantle to its thermal dissociation point the freed hydrogen then seeks out a electron carbon has four open spots so you get CH4 or H+ can bond with itself sharing electrons as H2. There is no mechanism geologically to polymer CH4 to CH2nH chain hydrocarbons at the temps you are making H2 and CH4 you are well past the cracking temps of any longer hydrocarbon at any pressure. The tectonic setting for subduction is exactly wrong for making basin trap structure to capture any produced methane or H2 gasses as they migrate updip these are lost eventually to the seafloor and feed large communities of methane and H2 eating bacteria it is thought that the deep sea vent methane in the trench areas are a good bit of mantle methane now as more isotopic study is done. There is a window along dip where hydrate formation could occur in that case there would be large amounts of mantle methane trapped as ice in the seabed but it is no means liquid hydrocarbons it’s solid water methane hybrid with a nasty instability curve right up against it’s metastable state. Don’t be above it if you set off a chain reaction of instability the volume of gas released can lower seawater density below .8g/cm at that point things don’t float anymore your drill ship or floating semisubmersable rig is on it way to the bottom.

Lignin is what coal is made from largely it is why when you liquify coal you get primarily aromatics not linear chain hydrocarbons. The Germans called liquid coal products benzine because the primary light liquid product is benzene at 105 octane to boot. Too bad it’s a massive carcinogen it’s perfect petrol for high compression engines.