Imagine the future when you get on a plane, fly somewhere great and the flight is not only emission free but also there are no white streaky trails across the sky.
That’s a picture of flying painted by Jonathan Wood from a company called Nova Pangea Technologies, a British company looking at trying to make air travel cleaner and greener using SAF (sustainable aviation fuel).
Jonathan who previously worked for bp told me the near future is still fuel based aeroplanes.
He explained: “There are various opportunities here to develop new propulsion systems, electric and even hydrogen. Electric looks like it might be feasible for shorter haul and smaller aircraft. But for the larger and long haul aircraft, we need a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. So the challenge is to find a way of making that possible.
“But in so doing, not adding to the carbon that’s in our ecosystem, not digging it out of the ground but rather recycling what’s already in our ecosystem. At the end of the day, this is the technology development and the development of supply chains and production of this fuel, at least in the near term.”
At Nova Pangea, a start-up, they are looking at using biomass to make a new type of fuel that could eventually be carbon negative.
“We have got a process whereby we take waste biomass and that can be forestry residue, woodchips, sawdust but also agricultural residues. So it could be the leftovers from wheat, straw production, or it could be corn, or it could be even bagasse, which is the leftovers from sugar cane production.
“So it’s taking waste biomass, cleaning it putting it through a process whereby we produce at the end of it sugars, which then are fermented into an alcohol called ethanol, which then is upgraded to make a fuel.”
Their process is particularly effective at cutting carbon emissions as it ‘fixes’ the left over plant material.
“For any ten tonnes of raw material, biomass waste we may put in, we might get five tonnes of ethanol and then five tonnes of a solid product called lignin, which is basically carbon. That’s being captured and sequestered in the solid material and it doesn’t decompose and that can be deployed in the farming sector or in horticulture or even in the construction and cement sector.
“It’s at the very least carbon neutral and potentially carbon negative depending on how you make it, you know, whether you use renewable power and the like in the production process.”
Jonathan also discussed the advantage of a clean liquid fuel, as it would be using all the existing infrastructure in the aviation sector, such as pipelines and tankers. At present, SAF has to be mixed with 50% fossil based aviation fuel but that will change as airlines update their fleets to run on these cleaner fuels.
Will it cost more, for sure in the shorter term he tells me but it’s a choice we will have to make.
“Yes, it’s going to be higher cost than the usual jet fuel that we’ve been using up until now. But we’ve got to move in this direction and there are various options and we need to be pushing hard on all of these options and ultimately the market and technology around the world, will determine which come to the fore and which are the solutions that really can be scaled up.”
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