Greener skies ahead: the promise of sustainable aviation fuel
Avioxx CEO Chris Hancock had the pleasure of speaking to Simon Calder, renowned travel journalist and travel correspondent for The Independent, on a recent podcast episode about sustainable aviation fuel.
In the episode, Chris gives a summary of how Avioxx is using innovative methods to lower the production costs of sustainable fuels, all in an effort to enable net-zero flights. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below to learn more.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and published with the permission of Simon Calder.
Simon Calder:
Hello and welcome to today’s Independent Travel Podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 1st of July. Yes, we're more than halfway through the year. Where has it gone, and what's happening in the future? That's the subject for today's podcast. I’m looking at sustainable aviation fuel — which a lot of people think is the best way forward for limiting the damage caused by flying — and a possible new process that could actually see the amount that's available to airlines being much more widely available and much cheaper.
The basic idea of sustainable aviation fuel is that you are not actually getting fossil fuels out of the ground. The great advantage of the engines that are being made now is that they can use this in the same way as they would with traditional aviation fuel. There’s a Virgin Atlantic flight from London Heathrow to New York JFK last November which did this, and that was using recycled cooking oil. Trouble is, there's not a lot of raw materials available that can go into this. But today's guest Chris Hancock, who is the Chief Executive of Avioxx, believes that his company has hit upon processes that will increase the supply and cut the cost of the precious fluid that powers you and I around the world. It’s all to do with solid oxide fuel cells, as he’s been telling me.
Chris Hancock:
Sustainable aviation fuel is an incredibly exciting area of innovation, and what's brilliant about Avioxx — what I'm really excited about — is the feedstock that we're using. So we take household municipal waste, of which 28.8 million tonnes per year in the UK goes to incineration or landfill, and using the novel Avioxx system that we're developing, we can turn those molecules and rearrange those molecules into sustainable aviation fuel using a series of different reactors to achieve that.
There are various companies who are making sustainable aviation fuel at the moment in very limited quantities. Virgin Atlantic had a massive achievement in November last year where they flew the first flight from London to New York on 100% sustainable aviation fuel. However, the feedstock that they were using was used cooking oil, which is very limited in supply. So that's one example, one way of making sustainable aviation fuel. But using hydrocarbons that are already within the environment that we can reprocess allows us at Avioxx to make the fuel. Without getting too technical, there's a number of different reactors that we use. So, there’s the Fischer-Tropsch reactor which is a well-established technology. There’s gasification which is turning the solid waste into what's called synthesised gas, and what the secret with the Avioxx process is that there's a new technology called solid oxide fuel cells which are essentially like an electricity generator. And that allows us to introduce electrolysis and therefore take the energy from the waste and use traditional reactors to manufacture the fuel.
Simon:
How come you, at Avioxx, are in the lead?
Chris:
Well, my co-founders professor Steve Wilkinson and Dr. Michael Hancock have got a lot of experience within the energy sector and they're also from the North West of the UK where, historically, we've made a lot of fuel. So, there's a lot of expertise there, and professor Steve Wilkinson and Dr. Mike Hancock have been working on a patent for the past 10 years about this effective way to generate energy but only recently applying it to the production and manufacturing of sustainable aviation fuel. It’s a new idea that we developed about 14 months ago when we started the company, so we've got a bit of a head start because we've got the skills and the expertise within the team to help progress. So, hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea on where we are with the process.
Simon:
How much is it all gonna cost? Because that's the big issue that a lot of people have been facing. Sustainable aviation fuel prices are very high. Airlines pledging to use as much as they can all sound to me as though it's adding up to higher fares.
Chris:
That's exactly the point that we're trying to address because sustainable aviation fuel only is really a solution when it's at price parity to fossil, and then we've got a real market that doesn't have to be subsidised by governments. And that's really what our ambition is here: to be able to develop methods and a way of producing the fuel so it’s a reasonable cost for the passengers and the airlines.
Simon:
What I'm sort of hearing from a lot of people in technology is that actually hydrogen is the future — or perhaps improving batteries so that the energy density really improves. You're saying that effectively we don’t really need to do all of that, and we can carry on using the same engines which is obviously going to be fairly miraculous.
Chris:
Exactly. And we can use the same engines and the same infrastructure with sustainable aviation fuel. Maybe there will be other technology in 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, but the lifetime of a plane is three decades, so I've seen the sustainable aviation fuel movement as an interim step before we continue to develop plane technology and engine technology. And just going back to your point with hydrogen: within the Avioxx process, the solid oxide fuel cells, alongside electrolysers, generate hydrogen within the system, and that's actually what makes it really efficient in terms of a novel process. So, solid oxide fuel well cells are crucial to be able to introduce the efficiencies of the production of the fuel.
Simon:
That's Chris Hancock, Chief Executive of Avioxx, and thank you very much for listening. I'll talk to you again tomorrow. Goodbye.