Full-composition jet fuel from CO 2 hydrogenation: interfacial reaction network engineering delivering on the e-SAF promise

Aviation needs a fuel it cannot yet produce at scale, and direct CO2 hydrogenation offers one of the shortest conditional routes to full-composition, drop-in electro-sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF). The central constraint is no longer merely the Brønsted–Evans–Polanyi trade-off at an isolated site, but the architecture of a reaction network in which CO2 activation, C–C coupling, aromatic formation, hydrogenation, and heat removal must cooperate. Interfacial reaction network engineering (IRNE) turns this into a design rule: an oxide domain activates C–O bonds, a zeolite domain drives C–C coupling and aromatization, and the two are coupled via controlled interfacial transfer of short-lived intermediates under a weak chemical-potential driving force. Recent kiloton-scale validation—high CO2 conversion, high C8+ selectivity, low methane, and thousand-hour operation without oxidative regeneration—shows the “impossible triangle” of activity, selectivity, and stability can be relaxed when catalyst nanostructure and fluidized-bed hydrodynamics are co-designed. The remaining question is boundary-dependent rather than conceptual: whether cheap renewable electricity, low-cost carbon, million-tonne modules, and on-spec upgrading converge fast enough to make full-composition CO2 fuel competitive. We close by identifying the operando descriptors, scale-sensitive economics, and open engineering questions that must now be settled.