In what might have once been a “royal scandal”, British Airways is getting ready to burn garbage to produce fuel to power its modern jets.
It has been called garbage power, biogas, landfill, gasification, feedstock and others but in the world of energy production it is known as “low hanging fruit.” It is a no-brainer to advance projects like a waste-to-fuel plant model when scientific consensus suggests that the longer we can keep fossil fuels in the ground, the better off we’ll be.
Technology & Consortium Spur Airline Industry Adoption Of Biogas
Solena Fuels, British Airways and a consortium of 10 airlines around the world including American Airlines, FedEx, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Lufthansa and Air Canada have entered into a series of agreements in which Solena will build biogas facilities near airports. Solena’s business model is to own the plants and continue to develop its proprietary technology, selling biofuel and byproducts at market rates.
Solena has already completed design of the GreenSky London plant near Heathrow and will use trash generated by London’s residents to generate “biojet fuel” for commercial flights. The plant will go online in 2018. All told, the London plant will process 551,156 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) into jet fuel and bionaptha, an oil blending component and feedstock for the petrochemical industry, per year.
Solena Group’s “plasma gasification technology” combined with the “Fischer Tropsch” will be used in one of the first major efforts to exploit a vastly underutilized resource. Solena uses high concentrations of algae production in columnar bioreactors and artificial photosynthesis to mass-produce large amounts of biofuel without the need for large land area.
Production of biogas does not produce any extra emissions and the capital cost of building biogas plants is actually less than building incinerators of similar capacity.
For more information see Solena’s “Bio-Energy Platforms: A Vision of the Future.”
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References and related content:
- Global Trend & Forecast of Gasification Market to 2019
- Biofuels in the Airline Industry | InnovativeIndustry.net
- Flight of Fancy? British Airways to Purchase $500M of Biofuels – Forbes
