Someday soon, the same company will be able to fill both your jet’s liquor cabinet as well as its fuel tanks. Air Company, a start-up in the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) market has introduced Air Vodka, an award-winning spirit that is derived from ethanol, a by-product of its SAF refining process which uses just carbon dioxide and hydrogen as its source material. “In many cases of CO2 conversion technologies, ethanol is on the pathway to making the longer hydrocarbon chains that you end up making your sustainable aviation fuel out of,” explained Stafford Sheehan, Air Company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Currently one of the most exclusive spirits in the world, Air Vodka is distilled at the company’s pilot test facility in the industrial underbelly of Brooklyn, New York, which is proving and perfecting the company’s production technology at a small scale before hundreds of millions of dollars are spent constructing full-scale production plants. As a result, the company—which was founded in 2017—produces only a limited amount of SAF that is used mainly for test purposes. The amount of ethanol produced is even less, resulting in a yearly production of only a few thousand bottles of vodka a year at most.
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