REFILE-FEATURE-In Hunt for Clean Jet Fuel, South Africa Swaps Tobacco for Weeds
by Munyaradzi Makoni (Reuters) When a South African Airways Boeing 737 took off from O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg two years ago, headed for Cape Town, it was powered by an unusual fuel: tobacco.
South Africa hasn’t yet repeated the jet biofuel feat, but in an effort to cut its climate-changing emissions and promote greener power the country’s researchers are looking for innovative ways to manufacture green aviation fuel at larger scale.
A new “Waste to Wing” project aims to one day produce a significant share of the country’s aviation fuel from waste plants, including invasive species.
“South Africa produces a large amount of agricultural waste, as well as waste from plantation forestry and waste biomass from alien vegetation clearing programmes,” said Tjasa Bole-Rentel, an energy economics and policy specialist for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the groups involved in the biofuel push.
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“When there’s no local production capacity, the feedstock must be shipped out of the country and shipped back after refining. This makes the sustainable aviation fuel much more expensive,” she (Merel Laroy, a spokesman for SkyNRG) said.
The Waste to Wing project, with $1.4 million in funding from the European Union’s SWITCH Africa Green Programme, aims to solve that problem and cut costs and protect agricultural production and forests by using waste to create fuel.
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“As the name suggests, the Waste to Wing project will focus on waste biomass”, including leftovers from food and livestock feed production, paper making and furniture production, Bole-Rentel said.
At the moment, most of the agricultural waste produced in the country is burned, she said.
In some areas, harvested invasive plants already are being used to produce charcoal or fibrous products such as coffins, but most of the waste is unused, she said, and only that unused supply will be diverted to the jet fuel project.
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One huge challenge with such projects is the cost of transporting plant waste, so material would need to be sourced as close as possible to where jet biofuel is produced, Mamphweli (Sampson Mamphweli, director of the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University) said.
And “the cost of the actual biomass material is also a big factor,” he said. Often, a once useless and free material becomes valuable when there is a use for it, he said. READ MORE
