Regional technoeconomic and life-cycle carbon assessment of direct air capture-based power-to-liquid sustainable aviation fuel production

초록

Decarbonizing aviation requires sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathways integrating low-carbon CO2, renewable hydrogen, and reliable energy under variable renewable conditions. However, prior power-to-liquid (PtL) SAF assessments typically vary process configuration and scale alongside location, preventing regional conditions from being isolated as the driver of economic and carbon performance. This study develops an integrated PtL SAF pathway combining solid-sorbent direct air capture (S-DAC), proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolysis, reverse water–gas shift, Fischer − Tropsch synthesis, hydrocracking, and product separation. An identical 70-MW facility is evaluated across five locations, Frankfurt, Jeddah, Jeju, Las Vegas, and Perth, as a methodological control, using process simulation, hourly renewable dispatch optimization, technoeconomic analysis, production-stage life-cycle carbon assessment, sensitivity analysis, and multicriteria decision-making. The system produces 1543 kg/h of SAF from 9269 kg/h of captured CO2 and 1329.3 kg/h of renewable hydrogen. Results show regional resource quality strongly influences PtL feasibility, as the PEM electrolyzer dominates electricity demand. Jeddah achieved the lowest levelized cost of product at 2977 $/ton,supportedbya250.7M$ capital expenditure and a 93 % energy self-sufficiency ratio, while Frankfurt exhibited the highest cost at 5861 $/ton due to greater grid-electricity reliance. The production-stage global warming potential ranged from 2.84 kg CO2-eq/kg fuel in Jeddah to 4.97 kg CO2-eq/kg fuel in Frankfurt. High-solar regions maintained stable production costs under electricity price fluctuations, and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats-analytic hierarchy process ranking identified Jeddah as the most suitable location within the adopted framework, retained across all weight-perturbation scenarios. © 2026 Elsevier Ltd.

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