British Airways to use biofuel made from municipal waste

Fuel made from municipal waste will form a small part of the aviation turbine fuel that British Airways, the flag-carrier airline of the United Kingdom, will use from 2014. British Airways has signed an agreement to this effect with Solena Group, the biofuel company based in the United States.

British Airways, one of the top 3 airlines based in Europe, said it will buy all the “sustainable jet fuel” that Solena Group makes from a plant that is expected to be located in London and likely to become operational in 2014.

Municipal waste can produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, if it is left to decay in dumps. Hence, transforming the waste into liquid fuel and burning it instead of conventional fuels is good for the ecosystem.

The planned biofuel plant will convert 500,000 tonnes of waste each year into 16 million gallons of eco-friendly fuel, which, according to British Airways and Solena Group, will cut emissions of greenhouse-gases.

Conventional aviation turbine fuel (ATF), made out of crude oil, produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, when it is burned.

In a statement, British Airways said the volume of the biofuel to be used in its planes will be the equivalent of 2% of the carrier’s current operation at London’s Heathrow Airport, which is the busiest international airport in the world.

British Airways added that it intends to get 10% of all its jet fuel needs from fuel derived from waste by 2050.

Citing research, British Airways said that about 3 million tonnes of organic waste, mostly from food, is produced in London each year.

The Solena Group will produce the aviation fuel through gasification of the city waste into what is called ‘syngas’ – which is then converted into liquid fuel by the Fischer Tropsch process, or Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

The Guardian newspaper quoted British Airways as saying that the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Standardisation Organisation (Dstan), which regulates aviation fuel in the United Kingdom, has not yet certified for use the planned biofuel. The authorities want more tests to ensure that using the biofuel will not compromise the safety and performance of the aircraft’s engines.

British Airways said it is confident that the ‘biojet fuel’ will be certified in the United Kingdom by the time the Solena Group builds the plant in 2014. Even if certification is not granted by that time, British Airways said that airlines based in the United Kingdom can still use the biofuel since the in the United States had approved it in 2009.

There are some aviation experts who think that planes cannot be flown using pure biofuel since aircraft need high operational performance always and also because of the very cold temperatures in which airline engines have to operate. ?