US President Donald Trump swept into office with the blessing of oil industry executives, who are now crying bitter tears over their favorite son’s humiliating “deal” with Iran. Too bad for them. The Trump-engineered debacle in Iran has provided a fresh shot of momentum to the renewable energy transition, and the emerging electrofuels industry is front and center in the rush to replace petroleum fuels in aviation. Electrofuels & Sustainable Aviation Electrofuels, or e-fuels, are synthetic liquid fuels produced with electrolysis and carbon capture instead of fossil fuels. Ideally powered by renewable energy, the electrolysis side of the equation jolts hydrogen gas from water, while the carbon capture system draws from ambient air or other sources. All that’s left to do is put the hydrogen and carbon together to form new hydrocarbon fuels. There being no such thing as a free lunch, electrofuels are more expensive to produce than conventional kerosene jet fuel. Still, an opportunity has opened up in aviation industry. Despite years of development, bio-based alternatives to conventional kerosene jet fuel have been slow to gain commercial scale-up. Researchers are also concerned that the impacts of raising energy crops outweigh the benefits. Battery-electric and fuel cell electric aircraft are beginning to emerge in small sizes, but they face formidable scale-up barriers. Accordingly, aviation stakeholders have been on the prowl for a different approach By 2023, Texas began emerging as a hotspot for electrofuel investors. Among other projects, Texas is the host state of Project Roadrunner, a sprawling facility supported by American Airlines. The Sora Fuels Solution Electrofuel innovators have been hammering away at the cost-cutting conundrum, and the US startup Sora Fuel has come up with a solution. Sora credits research in the laboratory of Curtis Berlinguette at the University of British Columbia with its foundational technology, though it has made its corporate home in Boston. In the latest development, on April 8 Sora Fuel reported the closure of a $14.6 million round of funding from Spero Ventures and Inspired Capital as co-leaders, with participation from Engine Ventures and Wireframe Ventures. If Spero rings a bell, you may be thinking of Marc Tarpenning, a Venture Partner at Spero and a Sora Fuel Board Member. Tarpenning’s first major foray in the clean tech field was Tesla Motors, which he co-founded with Martin Eberhard in 2003 before current CEO Elon Musk joined as investor and additional co-founder in 2004. Sora’s contribution to the electrofuel field is an integrated system that skims over the expense of the sorbents typically used in conventional DAC (direct air capture) systems. Taming The DAC Beast Sora plans to deploy its new cash haul to construct a pilot facility at a location to be named, enabling it to scale up production from gallons to barrels within the relatively short timeline of 18 to 24 months. If all goes according to plan, Sora anticipates that it can capture carbon at a cost of less than $50 per ton, which the company states is about 1/10 the cost of existing DAC technologies. The resulting SAF will come in at less than $5.00 per gallon. The new round of funding comes on top of an earlier $6 million Sora nailed down in 2024, which featured Engine Ventures in the lead and Wireframe Ventures among other participants. At the time, Sora anticipated that it could bring DAC costs down even lower. “The company’s novel technology includes a liquid bicarbonate electrolyzer 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,” Sora said of itself. Still, coming in at less than $50 per ton is quite an achievement. Just a few years ago, in 2023, the World Economic Forum calculated DAC costs at $600-$1,000 per ton. “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,” the company elaborated in a press statement dated August 1, 2024. Sora CEO and co-founder Gareth Roth added his two cents, stating that the new system technology “eliminates 90% of the energy currently required in standard DAC processes.” Electrofuels Dodge The Trump Chopper During his first year back in office, Trump laid waste to renewable energy programs supported by the US Department of Energy, including a $7 billion program aimed at adding water electrolysis and other sustainable systems to the nation’s hydrogen profile. Still, a few programs managed to slip through the Trump chopper, including the GCxN (GameChanger Accelerator) partnership between Shell’s GameChanger branch and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (currently named the National Laboratory of the Rockies). Last September, the partners listed Sora Fuel among the five startups to earn a slot in their seventh cohort, issued under the theme “future feedstocks and electrochemical pathways to fuels.” Sora’s award covered improving and scale up its electrolyzer cells, in consultation with NREL staff. Two other US startups also made the electrofuels cut, as described by GCxN: RenewCO2 (Somerset, New Jersey): RenewCO2 develops electrocatalytic conversion technology that transforms carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals using only water and electricity. GCxN will support reactor design, characterization of fuel properties, and techno-economic analysis. SKYRE (East Hartford, Connecticut): SKYRE uses advanced electrochemical processes to convert carbon dioxide into high-value fuels and chemicals such as methanol and synthetic gas. GCxN will help advance SKYRE’s CO2RENEW system by designing optimized feed and production manifolds and evaluating product separation techniques. For the record, the other two awardees will work with the lab to fine tune next-generation biofuel processes, with Aquora Biosystems of Michigan developing an organic waste biorefinery system and Consolidated Carbon of Texas working on hemp-based feedstocks. Be Careful What You Wish For… Meanwhile, reports of oil industry regrets have been circulating as Trump’s war on Iran sends global supply chains into a tailspin, on account of nobody telling him that Iran can single-handedly prevent cargo ships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Everything being relative, reports of oil industry executives making bank off the war have also been circulating, as CEO’s cash in on stock sales — some pre-scheduled, some not — adding to allegations that insider information has been leaking out of the White House. On balance, though, oil industry executives are right to feel upset that Trump has put the lie to their carefully crafted messages about reliability and national security. His war has sparked a fresh surge of interest in electric vehicles, plug-in solar panels, and other modern oil-free devices, providing the decarbonization movement with a badly needed jolt of activity. For that matter, electrofuels are not the only low-carbon systems to escape the tar pit of Trump’s energy policy. Upon taking office last year, Trump also drew a protective shield around biofuels, geothermal energy, hydropower, and the somewhat obscure field of marine energy alongside nuclear energy, leaving only solar and wind power out in the cold. Go figure… Photo (cropped): Electrofuel systems can deploy green hydrogen and captured carbon to produce synthetic aviation fuel, potentially scaling up more quickly than bio-based SAF alternatives (cropped, courtesy of US DOE).