15 Minutes of FAME - FSRL

A project I have been working on for more than a year came to an untypical conclusion this past week - an official ceremonial hand-off in front of a crowd. The event wasn't a calculated and showy production 

The FSRL Tool

intended to send stock prices through the ceiling, like a Steve-Jobs-new-Apple-product-roll-out at a technology showcase. It was just a simple signal that a work was completed, a commitment fulfilled, and its time to move on with the next steps that are needed over a long haul towards a commercial era for aviation biofuels. 

Below is a report from the Aviation Week periodical about the product that was sent by one of the co-developers on the team. The purple color represents Fuel Readiness Level (FRL) by way of the color of the jerseys worn by fuel technicians on aircraft carriers. The green represents the Feedstock Readiness Level (FSRL) and the natural origin of biomass from farms and forests. This is the kind of stuff that is a long ways from the farm.
_______________________
FAA-Led CAAFI Moves To Measure Readiness Of Biofuel Feedstocks
Aviation Daily Dec 02, 2011, p. 11
Graham Warwick
The FAA-led Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI) has unveiled a tool designed to help bridge the gap between feedstock providers and fuel producers as it strives to develop a supply chain for sustainable aviation biofuels. 

Feedstocks from farms

Developed for CAAFI by the U.S. Agriculture Dept. (USDA) and modeled on NASA-pioneered technology readiness levels (TRL), the new feedstock readiness tool “will allow biorefiners to make quicker, easier assessments of feedstock opportunities,” says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, addressing the CAAFI general meeting yesterday in Washington. The tool will enable industry “to look at where potential biomass sources are and what steps are needed to get them to the biorefineries,” he says.

The new feedstock readiness level (FSRL) is a companion to CAAFI’s established fuel readiness level (FRL) tool, which indicates where a specific process for producing an alternative jet fuel is on its development path. FSRL is an effort to bring some order to “the craziness of how many feedstocks are out there,” says Jeffrey Steiner of the USDA Research Service. “It’s a tool to bridge [the gap] between farmers and biorefiners.”

As with TRLs and FRLs, the FSRL tool ranks feedstock readiness on levels from 1 to 9, from concept to commercial-scale deployment. Levels 1-4 cover preliminary evaluation and small-scale experimental testing. These levels “precede any large-scale investment in growing millions of acres,” says Steiner. Levels 5 and 6 cover validation of the alternative-fuel production system, while 7-9 involve the final stages of commercial deployment.

Where green fuels will come from

Assessing feedstock readiness is more complex than technology or fuel readiness levels, as each level includes production, market and policy components plus a linkage to the readiness of the technology needed to convert a specific feedstock to jet fuel. “Farmers are used to growing crops for which there is a market already out there,” Steiner says. “But they can’t count on growing a crop and having someone come buy it and turn it into jet fuel. There is a close linkage.”
 
Efforts are now under way within CAAFI to extend the concept of fuel and feedstock readiness levels to encompass the work required to ensure that the sustainability of aviation biofuels complies with regulatory frameworks for renewable fuels.