Regulators said its quality is nearly identical to what is traditionally used in planes:
Firefly Green Fuels, a UK-based company, has developed a new form of jet fuel that is entirely fossil-free and made from human waste. The company worked with experts at Cranfield University to confirm that the fuel they developed had a 90 percent lower carbon footprint than what is used in aviation today, according to the BBC. Tests by independent regulators validated that what Firefly Green Fuels has developed is nearly identical to standard A1 jet fuel.
In 2021, the company received a £2 million grant from the Department of Transport to continue developing its sustainable aviation fuel. Although it's not yet available commercially, the company says it is on track to bringing its fuel to the global market and it will have its first commercial plant operating within 5 years. The company has already inked a partnership with the budget airline Wizz Air — the name of the company and the source of its potential combustibles could scarcely be a more perfect pairing — to supply it with fuel starting in 2028.
It currently sources its waste from water companies in the UK and takes the refined sewage through a process called hydrothermal liquefaction, which converts the liquid waste into a sludge or crude oil. Solid by-products can also be made into crop fertilizer. The company claims that the carbon intensity of the whole process — which measures how much carbon is needed to produce energy — is 7.97 grams of carbon dioxide per megajoule (gCO²e/MJ). Comparatively, the ICCT says carbon intensity recorded for jet fuel ranges from 85 to 95 gCO²e/MJ.
[...] The achievement of carbon neutrality in our airspaces has been a longtime goal for regulators and leaders in Europe and the US. While EVs have made headway in the car industry, it might be a while before we see battery powered commercial jets. So in the meantime, solutions for creating more environmentally-friendly jet fuel are welcome.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday January 01, @12:34PM (1 child)
Because as we speak, North Korea is working on a procedure to turn shit into butter, and they have reached 50% success:
Spread's on par.
Taste still off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01, @07:48PM
Exactly, 5 years out is plenty of time to run away with the money from any
investorssuckers.(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday January 01, @02:16PM (2 children)
delivering dividends already....
Sewage sludge can't be easily made into fertilized because of all the non-shit shit that's in it. Think drugs, the legal ones. Also, pollution, the non-shit one.
As for oil from sewage, what happened to the algae being grown on sewage and made into oil substitute?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 01, @09:04PM (1 child)
State of the art used to be "ferment" into methane, then turn the methane into synoil EXACTLY like how natgas (mostly methane) is turned into synthetic motor car oil (make slightly smaller molecules and you got synthetic jet fuel)
The chemistry phrases you're looking for are generically "gas to liquids" or GTL, and more specifically stuff like the Fischer–Tropsch process.
We're at the economic stage where the company that made a million gallons of synthetic jet fuel using FT for the US Air force around the turn of the century got mergered several times and is now part of Chevron. I used to invest in petrochem but "everything good was merged up decades ago" there's not many nickels in front of the steamrollers left for me to grab in this area LOL although I know a lot about the topic and also about chemistry in general.
FT is old technology. As for energy efficiency, if the cost of the barrels sold exceed the cost of the barrels purchased by more than a dozen or so bucks, a GTL plant will make a financial profit. Not break even energetically, not assume $0/hr slave labor, but run a plant in the USA under EPA rules and new york financial market sources of capital and still make a financial profit around, meh, $12 to at most $20 bucks depending on situation. So if you can buy a barrel of shitty asphalt like heavy crude for $X and sell a barrel of delicious unleaded high octane mogas for $X+20 or so the plant will make a profit. Seeing as few plants are solar powered, presumably processing "a hundred bucks" of crude into "more than a hundred bucks of mogas" can't use more than $20 of energy even if literally their only financial cost were energy (which, LOL, it CERTAINLY is not). I would be surprised if a MODERN post 1940s FT plant "burns" more than 5% of its feedstock to power the rest of the process. This is heavy filthy dirty industry, its not like greenwashing biodiesel where its "OK" WRT marketing to burn two barrels of crude oil-supplied diesel to ship one barrel of the greenest of greenwashing biodiesel.
Given that the input feedstock would be fermented human shit, plus or minus paying for a sewer pipe connection and disposal of the eventual waste products, if you can sell a barrel of fuel for more than $20 you "should be able to" run a profit using industrial scale decades old processes. Well, its cheaper to buy up natgas excess in the summer or WTF than to traffic in human waste, if you want a stream of methane as a feedstock. Essentially the problem is its too cheap and less enviromentally damaging to drill for natgas than to pump poop all over the place. Possibly this companies "secret sauce" is they have a cheap way to pump poop, or they finally found the mythical way to make poop in sewers flow uphill that plumbers have always dreamed of.
There are downsides. Poop is stinky. The plants are huge. Fermenters are huge. Methane leaks and explodes. Most of the poop is made right next door to where they'd like to burn it, but they don't want a fermenter and FT chemical plant as next door neighbors. Pipelines are very energetically costly and it "used to be" energetically impossible to pump "X" units of natgas more than 800 or so miles without burning "X" units of natgas in the process of compressing it... Not that you'd have to space FT plants exactly 800 miles away, but my point is pumping methane derived by poop 80 miles requires you to burn at least 10% of it just to run the compressors, ruins the overall efficiency figures. Industrial problems, just like mechanized warfare, are really all about logistics not scientific possibility, and the logistics of poop-related chemical plants are complicated.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 01, @09:10PM
Or the methane equivalent WRT F-T process, late at night where I am LOL... you get the idea anyway.