At a joint presentation in London, European low-cost carrier Wizz Air announced it has set a goal of powering 10% of its flights with sustainable aviation fuel by 2030, while its UK SAF partner Firefly unveiled plans for an initial sewage-to-SAF demo plant on the east coast of England. The fast-growing airline is looking to expand its current fleet of 206 Airbus narrowbody fleet to around 500 by the end of the decade and meeting its aspirational SAF target will require a significant ramp-up of SAF production and deployment, it acknowledged. Adopting a portfolio approach, Wizz Air has entered into a number of agreements, including a multi-year offtake with Firefly, which in turn has signed MoUs with industrial partners including Haltermann Carless, Petrofac, Chevron Lummus Global and Anglian Water. It hopes to construct an operational demo facility by 2027 and reach commercial-scale production by 2029 at an existing facility near the port of Harwich.

Following a collaboration with Airbus on a hydrogen project, Wizz Air has decided progress on this form of powering future aircraft is too slow and no longer fits with its medium to long term fleet strategy, and it is now fully focused on SAF, as well as ambitious fleet renewal and operational efficiency plans. In 2023, the airline achieved a record annual average CO2 intensity of 51.5 grams per passenger/km, a 6.8% year-on-year reduction, and has committed to reduce carbon emissions per passenger/km by 25% by 2030.

SAF will play a crucial role and is the game changer in reducing carbon emissions from aviation but there are big challenges over cost and availability, acknowledged Yvonne Moynihan, Corporate and ESG Officer at Wizz Air. “Therefore, we call on policymakers to address barriers to SAF deployment at scale by incentivising production, providing price support and embracing additional sustainable feedstocks for biofuel production,” she said.

As a low-cost fares airline, Wizz Air operates at secondary airports across Europe, where Moynihan fears SAF supplies are likely to be scarcer than at the main hubs. It is also competing with rival budget airline Ryanair for SAF, which has set an ambitious 12.5% by 2030 target. There is a reluctance by the carrier to pass on the SAF price premium to its customers, who she said were very price sensitive, and hopes policy incentives can relieve the cost burden.

“The more that policy can drive investment, the more likely the cost of SAF production can be lowered and therefore provide better availability and at lower prices so that we don’t need to pass them on,” she said, adding the airline favoured a Europe-wide SAF book-and-claim system in order to avoid the probability of large quantities of SAF being trucked around Europe to comply with the mandate rule that all EU airports will need to be supplied with the fuel regardless of where it is produced.

The airline has signed offtakes with producers for supplies in Europe but recognises it may have to import SAF from outside. In May 2023, along with low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines and Volaris, it joined a $50 million investment round in US SAF production startup CleanJoule, which included binding agreements by the three carriers to purchase up to 90 million gallons of SAF.

A £5 million equity investment in Firefly in April 2023 was Wizz Air’s first as a venture capitalist. “We hope this will encourage others in the industry to do the same thing,” said Moynihan. The funding will help Firefly with development, testing and qualification of its novel fuel produced through a new and as yet unapproved technology pathway.  

Wizz Air will be Firefly’s launch customer, with production of first volumes slated for 2028/2029 and delivered for use by the airline at Luton Airport. The offtake agreement is across 15 years for 525,000 tonnes of SAF in total and carries a reported value of almost $1 billion, with a potential to save 1.5 million tonnes of CO2-eq over the period, say the partners.

Moynihan said the airline was attracted to the Firefly project by the low feedstock costs and an expected competitive SAF end-price. Firefly estimates human sewage sludge – or biosolids, the useful dry solid fraction of the sludge – has the global potential to produce around 40 billion litres of SAF per year. In the UK alone, the prospective production could amount to 224,000 tonnes of SAF. The company is claiming its fuel is projected to deliver a 90% reduction in GHG emissions compared to fossil jet fuel on a life-cycle basis.

The Firefly production process involves hydrothermal liquefaction, also called hydrous pyrolysis, that converts the biosolid feedstock to biocrude and then hydrotreated to produce sustainable transport fuel. Another by-product of the process is biochar, which can be used for soil enhancement and carbon sequestration. As the new pathway is still in the ASTM certification process, Firefly is unable to say what the maximum blend limit will be for the fuel but expects it to be at the higher end of the scale.

The company has entered into a number of MoUs with industrial partners on its first Firefly Harwich plant, although it is still pulling together the necessary investment. The initial pilot facility, on which Firefly expects to break ground “in the coming months”, will be built at a specialist refinery site that is being repurposed by German hydrocarbon-based production company Haltermann Carless, which also has SAF ambitions in its home country. In 2022, it commissioned a hydrogenation plant at its Speyer site, close to Frankfurt Airport. It is expecting to produce around 60,000 tonnes of SAF and renewable chemicals annually from 2026, based on the alcohol-to-jet process and using EU RED II certified raw materials such agricultural and forestry residues.

Halterman Carless has also just signed a MoU with electricity generation and renewable energy company RWE to develop a green hydrogen plant on the Harwich site that would enable CO2 emissions to be reduced from production. The partners have completed feasibility studies for a green electrolyser at the site and they report work is underway to assess both grid and water connections to enable the project to go ahead.

US company Chevron Lummus Global, a joint venture between energy giant Chevron and Lummus Technology to supply technology for the production of transportation fuels, will provide bespoke refinery infrastructure to the Firefly Harwich project. CLG has developed its ISOTERRA hydroprocessing technology to convert feedstocks into SAF or renewable diesel. The design and build of the Firefly pilot plant will be handled by energy industry services provider Petrofac, which has already completed the pre-FEED study for the facility.

The feedstock will be provided by Anglian Water, which provides water supply, sewerage and sewage treatment to the East of England.

“The signing of these agreements marks a significant leap forward in realising our ambitions to develop a sustainable SAF industry here in the UK,” said James Hygate, CEO of Firefly, which plans to build three plants in the country. “Opening up this new sewage pathway will bring new jobs and growth to the UK, helping us to secure a greener and more prosperous future.”

Image: Wizz Air

Christopher Surgenor

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Eight proposed sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) projects have been shortlisted by the UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) to share up to £15 million ($20m) in grant funding to support early-stage development of large-scale SAF production plants in the UK. All selected projects have the potential to reduce emissions by more than 70% on a lifecycle basis when used in place of conventional fossil jet fuel, said the DfT. The plants plan to produce jet fuel from a variety of sources including sewage; household and commercial waste; alcohol derived from wastes; and from captured atmospheric carbon dioxide. Organisations standing to gain from the funding include Velocys, Fulcrum BioEnergy, LanzaTech, Lanzajet, Advanced Biofuel Solutions, Alfanar Energy, Green Fuels Research, Nova Pangaea and Carbon Engineering, with a few of the projects shortlisted still at their feasibility stage.

Research carried out for the DfT indicates that by 2040 the SAF sector could generate between £0.7 billion and £1.66 billion a year for the UK economy, with potentially half of this coming from the export of intellectual property and the provision of engineering services. Between 5,000 and 11,000 green jobs could also be created across the nation and SAF production could also increase UK fuel security.

The eight projects shortlisted in the Green Fuels, Green Skies (GFGS) competition are:

• Advanced Biofuel Solutions Ltd – ABSL will work with a British refinery and engineering company to produce a detailed engineering design for a new facility in Cheshire, north-west England. The plant will use gasification and Fischer-Tropsch (FT) technology to convert 130,000 tonnes of waste a year into aviation fuel.
• Alfanar Energy Ltd – The company’s Lighthouse Green Fuels (LGF) project, located in Tees Valley, north-east England, will use gasification and FT technology to convert household and commercial waste into around 180 million litres of SAF and naphtha. The project is currently completing design optimisation work ahead of starting the front-end engineering design (FEED) stage by the end of 2021.
• Fulcrum BioEnergy Ltd – The Fulcrum NorthPoint project, being developed at the Stanlow Manufacturing Complex in north-west England, will convert residual waste into around 100 million litres of SAF using gasification and FT technology. Funding will support the FEED stage of project work.
• Green Fuels Research Ltd – A joint endeavour between Green Fuels, Petrofac and Cranfield University, the FIREFLY project aims to demonstrate and certify a technology route to SAF from sewage sludge. Funding will support the project’s pre-FEED development stage.
• LanzaTech UK Ltd – Funding will support the FEED stage of a proposed facility in Port Talbot, South Wales, which is expected to produce over 100 million litres of SAF per year, using ethanol from biogenic wastes and industry flue gases.
• LanzaTech UK Ltd and Carbon Engineering – Funding will support a feasibility study into producing 100 million litres of SAF per year using Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture (DAC) technology, and hydrogen from water electrolysis to convert into SAF using Lanzatech’s gas fermentation and LanzaJet’s alcohol-to-jet technology. Project members include British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.
• Nova Pangaea Technologies (UK) Ltd – Along with British Airways and LanzaJet, the feasibility project will study the optimal design to construct a facility that produces more than 100 million litres of SAF a year using UK woody residues.
• Velcocys Projects Ltd – The funding will support progress towards FEED of the Altalto project being developed by Velocys and British Airways to build a commercial waste-to-SAF plant in Immingham, north-east England, using gasification and FT technology.

The eight projects are understood to be assured of funding with the amounts to each to be announced very shortly and subject to contract. The bulk of the funding will go to those projects in the pre-FEED or FEED phase with around £2 million expected to be awarded to those in their feasibility stage. The GFGS funding period is a fixed term from August to the end of March 2022.

Sean Doyle, CEO of British Airways, which is involved in four of the projects, commented: “We’re determined to transform the sustainability of our industry and this potential GFGS government funding is critical in helping us to show the feasibility of building SAF plants. These plants would be a game-changer for our industry, not only delivering SAF but also creating many hundreds of highly skilled jobs while increasing economic growth around the UK.”

Henrik Wareborn, CEO of Velocys, which benefited from funding under the government’s £20 million F4C competition held in 2017, said: “We welcome this new funding as it will help bring Altalto closer to the production of SAF. The GFGS initiative highlights the importance of building SAF facilities throughout the country that will help the UK not only to meet the targets set but also make a quantifiable impact on climate change.”

Added Jimmy Samartzis, CEO of US-based LanzaJet, which is partnering on one of the shortlisted projects with British Airways and Nova Pangaea, said: “Together, we are grateful to the Prime Minister and DfT for their support in advancing the production of SAF in the UK.”

The Green Fuels Research (GFR) project with Petrofac and Cranfield University will demonstrate an integrated route to SAF using sewage sludge as feedstock and encompasses engineering design and construction of a UK demonstration plant capable of generating the quantities of fuel to allow certification to international standards. This in turn, says GFR, will lead to a first-of-a-kind commercial refinery and roll-out to several locations where airports, pipeline terminals and wastewater treatment works are in close proximity. The company says around 53 million tonnes per annum of untreated sewage sludge are collected in the UK from about 8,500 wastewater treatment works.

Commenting on the competition announcement, Green Fuels CEO James Hygate said: “We’re delighted to have this opportunity to prove the environmental and commercial viability of the FIREFLY route, which integrates several existing technologies into a sustainable industrial process. Among many advantages, FIREFLY will use fully biogenic feedstock which will emit no fossil carbon, won’t contribute to deforestation or compete with food production, and will not rely on imports with long, high-emission supply chains. And perhaps most importantly, we expect to demonstrate exceptional carbon savings, meaning this is potentially a very fast route to decarbonising aviation that won’t rely on as yet unknown technologies.”

The competition has been managed by consultants Ricardo and once the funding has been distributed, it will monitor the eight projects on behalf of the DfT.

“We have been amazed by the diversity and creativity of the entries,” said Alexandra Humphris-Bach, Ricardo Principal Consultant. “All the selected projects have a clear potential to produce SAF capable of reducing emissions by more than 70% on a lifecycle basis, when used in place of a conventional fossil jet fuel.”

The UK’s Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, said: “Aviation will be central to our future growth and plans to build back greener from the pandemic, which is why we have invested over £20 million in the past year to decarbonise the sector in line with our world-leading net zero targets.

“With less than 100 days to go until COP26, we’re ramping up our efforts even further to help companies break ground on trailblazing waste to jet fuel plants and put the UK at the forefront of international SAF production.”

Photo: British Airways is involved in four of the eight shortlisted projects