The British government has proposed a mandate that aircraft fly on fuel that is at least 10% sustainable aviation fuel by 2030. The Times reports that this would require 1.5 billion L of sustainable aviation fuel a year in the UK. At the moment global production is no more than 450 million L.
See more on climate change at the base of the article
The owner of British Airways, International Consolidated Airlines Group (ICAG) has announced today that it has taken a stake in a business which proposes to produce bioethanol. That business is the privately owned Nova Pangaea Technologies. It is based in Redcar, North Yorkshire, UK.
The size of the stake is undisclosed but ICAG is injecting £4.4 million into the business.
The money will be used to build a biofuel producing plant from agricultural waste and wood residue. The biofuel will then be used by LanzaJet to make sustainable aviation fuel.
The new facility will be Nova Pangaea Technologies’ first waste-to-fuel commercial scale production facility of its kind in Britain.
This is one aspect of ICAG’s investment programme of sustainable aviation fuel. At the end of 2022, their investment into sustainable aviation fuel amounted to $865 million and accounted for 25% of the 1.25 billion L annually of sustainable aviation fuel that they will need in 2030.
ICAG it is also the owner of Iberia and Aer Lingus and they have taken an equity stake in LanzaJet, an American company which has promised to produce sustainable aviation fuel in Britain in an initiative called Project Speedbird.
The chief executive of ICAG said that the airline group is going in a different direction to e.g., the car industry where they’ve done little to invest in charging infrastructure for battery vehicles.
He believes that sustainable aviation fuel is “the only realistic option for long-haul airline’s to decarbonise, which is why investment in this area is so critical.”
The construction of the aforesaid plant will start this year, 2023.
This news is very relevant to the human-animal relationship which is the subject matter of this website. Global warming affects the human-animal and the animal alike. It is probably the most important topic in the history of humankind since the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor! Many people would disagree with that statement. In a hundred years’ time everyone will agree with it in my honest opinion.
