The airline industry is taking its first steps towards green energy.
British Airways has announced it is investing in a factory that will convert tonnes of household rubbish into enough jet fuel for all its flights from London City airport twice over.
Some 500,000 tonnes of waste generated by Londoners will be used by the UK facility each year to produce 16 million gallons of fuel.
Construction of the plant in east London will start within two years. It is set to produce fuel from 2014, creating up to 1,200 jobs.
BA said the plant would produce twice the amount of fuel needed to power all its flights from London City Airport.
It will be the first plant in Europe to produce jet fuel from waste matter.
It is estimated that the overall equivalent CO2 reduction as a result of the plant producing sustainable energy and fuel is approximately 550,000 tonnes per year.
The plant will be built by the US company Solena Group, with BA committing to buy all of its output.
The waste wil be fed into a high temperature “gasifier” to produce BioSynGas.
A chemical process called Fischer Tropsch is then used to convert the gas into biofuel.
Waste products from the process can be used to power the plant as well as supply 20MW of electricity to the national grid.
A solid waste product can be used as an aggregate in construction.
BA argues the plant will cut the amount of waste that is sent to landfill, reducing the amount of methane that is produced. Methane is thought to be a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Biomass power plants fuelled by organic matter such as food waste, wood chips and sewage could be more lucrative than wind farms says the accountancy firm KPMG in their annual renewable energy survey .
“Biomass looks set to be the ‘new wind’,” said Andy Cox, energy partner at KPMG who led the research. “Biomass plants have the potential to yield much higher returns than other renewable sources. A well-executed plant can deliver substantially greater economies of scale than wind. And the heat generated from incineration can supply neighbouring buildings, creating another revenue stream.”
The new UK government has recently announced an energy policy that places emphasis on technologies such as anaerobic digestion, which captures gas from decomposing food and human waste, and other biomass generation methods. Conspicuously absent was any specific mention of onshore wind farms.
This shift toward biomass mirrors a surge in interest from utilities and City investors, according. One major attraction of biomass power plants is the stability such projects give compared with wind, which is intermittent.
UK supermarket chain Tesco has announced that it is sending its waste meat to be converted into renewable energy for British homes.
The retailer has proudly revealed that it is recycling all of its meat waste to heat and electricity, stating that the 5,000 tonnes of out-of-date meat that it sends to biomass plants will generate 2,500 Mega Watt Hours of renewable energy each year – enough to power more than 600 homes for a year.
But the innovative scheme has come under attack from vegetarians.The Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (Viva) has branded the scheme as “macabre”, claiming that many consumers would be “horrified” to discover that their power was created from meat.
Viva campaign manager Justin Kerswell said that the supermarket would not need to recycle the waste meat if they did not over-order in the first place and described the scheme as a “sickening plaster solution”.
Tesco has defended the scheme, pointing out that meat is only a small proportion of the waste that is being turned into energy. The retailer is now diverting 100% of the waste produced by its entire UK business away from landfill in a bid to improve its environmental performance.
Tesco executive director Lucy Neville-Rolfe said: “Climate change is the biggest challenge facing us today and businesses such as Tesco have a responsibility to provide leadership.”
