British Airways Signs Deal to Make Biofuel for Aircraft
by Gerard Wynn (Reuters) British Airways will start sourcing a small portion of its jet fuel from municipal waste from 2014, under a deal with U.S.-based biofuel company Solena Group, the two companies announced on Monday.
British Airways, one of the top three airlines in Europe, said it had signed a deal to purchase all the “sustainable jet fuel” that Solena could make from a plant expected to be sited in London and operational from 2014.
The plant would convert 500,000 tonnes of waste annually into 16 million gallons of green jet fuel, which the two companies calculated would reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with burning normal jet fuel, also called kerosene.
,,,Municipal waste can emit a powerful greenhouse gas methane if it is left to rot in dumps, and the companies therefore calculated a climate change benefit from transforming the rubbish into a liquid fuel and burning it instead. …The aviation fuel will be produced from gasification of the waste into a so-called syngas which is then converted by the Fischer Tropsch process into liquid fuel. READ MORE and MORE and MORE