The Allplane Podcast #130 with Mukund Karanjikar, CleanJoule founder and CEO

The world badly needs sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and, fortunately, there is not shortage of entrepreneurs willing to take on the challenge to scale up production. Now, are all SAF pathways the same? Of course not.

Today on the podcast we will talk with Mukund Karanjikar, founder and CEO of CleanJoule, a SAF startup based in Utah that is developing a SAF production method that delivers more joules of energy per unit of fuel mass than other traditional biogenic pathways.

What’s more, not content with powering a commercial aviation industry that is thirsty for SAF, CleanJoule is also developing biogenic SAF for space travel. So, when it comes to CleanJoule, you could well say that the sky is not the limit!

The prospect of clean space travel is quite interesting by itself, but, of course, there are other considerations too, such as cost and strategic independence and, on these two counts, CleanJoule is also ready to deliver, says Mukund.

So, in today’s episode we are going to learn a bit more about CycloSAF and CycloRP, the two flavours of sustainable aviation fuel that CleanJoule is developing (for the aviation and space industries, respectively) and how CleanJoule plans to roll out and scale production before the end of this decade.

We will also talk about the positioning of CleanJoule is the broader and constantly evolving SAF industry landscape and why this startup has got the attention of prominent investors such as Indigo Partners (a private equity firm which owns a global portfolio of low-cost airlines) and Temasek (one of Singapore’s most prominent groups).

So, tune in for a fascinating talk with Mukund Karanjikar of CleanJoule about one of the most promising technologies I have seen so far in the field of SAF!