EU Leads the Way with Sustainable Jet Fuel Plant

Many folks are buying carbon credits to offset their yearly air travel for business and vacations but a full service airline based in London, British Airways has unveiled plans to establish what it believes will be Europe’s first ‘sustainable’ jet fuel plant

According to The Engineer, “the plant will produce aviation fuel from plasma gasification of biomass into BioSynGas which is then converted by Fischer Tropsch into biojet fuel. The facility will process all types of biomass and residue feedstock which will mainly be sourced from local waste management facilities. The process produces no waste products other than an environmentally-benign slag that can be used as construction aggregate.”

The plant is slated to be fully operational by 2014, and if successful, it will offer a way to convert 500 kilotonnes (1,102,311,310 pounds) of carbon-based material per year into 16 million gallons of jet fuel, and could potentially reduce annual carbon emissions by 145 kilotonnes (319,670,280 pounds).

The announcement of British Airlines’ plan to manufacture it’s own sustainable jet fuel comes fast on the heels of news that the U.S. Department of Defense has achieved a breakthrough that could put algae-based biofuels in use by American military aircraft much sooner than the 2016 goal.

This is great news and I hope the auto fuel industry is watching all the progress closely.