Manchester Airport is to become the first in the UK to have a direct supply of jet fuel made from household and commercial waste.
The sustainable fuel is blended with traditional jet fuel, with a 70% lower carbon footprint.
It will be delivered by existing pipelines from a refinery in Stanlow, Cheshire.
Operations director Rad Taylor said: “It’s really game-changing for the industry.”
He said: “It’s essentially about using non-recyclable waste, which would typically go into landfill, and using that to generate aviation fuel so it’s a real sustainable alternative.”
The airport, part of Manchester Airports Group, will work with Fulcrum BioEnergy Limited UK, which is developing a new refinery for sustainable aviation fuel.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “This partnership is a huge leap forward for the long-term competitiveness of Britain’s aerospace sector, demonstrating how, by going green, industry can create jobs and help level-up across the UK.
“Cleaner aerospace and aviation is at the centre of our plans to end the UK’s contribution to climate change by 2050.”
Neil Robinson, MAG’s CSR and airspace change director, said: “Today really is a landmark moment in our journey towards a decarbonised aviation sector.
“By working towards a future supply of SAF, direct to Manchester airport via existing pipelines from a local refinery, we’re making sustainable operations accessible for airlines based here.
“The introduction of SAF is testament to the innovation we have seen, and the collaboration between airports, airlines, the government and suppliers like Fulcrum to achieve real progress towards our goal of net zero for UK aviation by 2050.”
Fulcrum NorthPoint is set to produce around 100 million litres of SAF per year, which when blended 50/50 with traditional jet fuel, could fill the tanks of 1,200 Boeing 777-300s.
After decades of pressure from environmental groups, the Asian Development Bank said it would ‘no longer finance new coal-fired capacity’. But activists charge that its new policy will pave the way for fossil gas development.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will cease financing new coal-fired power stations, it announced through its draft energy policy on Friday (7 May).
The multi-lateral lender’s new policy stated that it “will withdraw from financing new coal power and heat plants” and support its developing member-countries “to achieve a planned and rapid phase-out of coal in the Asia and Pacific region.”
According to the draft policy, the bank will not finance coal mining, oil and natural gas field exploration, drilling, or extraction activities.
In ADB’s last energy policy released in 2009, it said it would prioritise energy security and poverty reduction even if it meanttapping coal and natural gas-based power generation.
The revision of ADB’s policy comes 10 months after its management conceded that its energy policy “is no longer adequately aligned with the global consensus on climate change, ongoing global transformation of the energy sector, and operational priorities of ADB’s new Strategy 2030.”
While this new policy puts the brakes on coal financing, it still opens doors for fossil gas development. Jasper Inventor, programme director, Greenpeace Southeast Asia
ADB’s independent evaluation department recommended in August 2020 that it formally withdraw from financing new coal-fired energy projects, a year after the bank’s former president Takehiko Nakao said that it was not yet ready to quit coal. The evaluation was based on an assessment of the bank’s energy policy over the past 10 years.
The evaluation report found that while the Philippines-headquartered bank has refrained from investing in coal-fired power plants, it now needs to align its policy to this practice and clarify its institutional position.
It has also contributed to the funding of the 4,000 megawatt (MW) Tata Mundra coal-fired project in India, the 600MW Visayas Baseload and Masinloc coal project in the Philippines, and the 1,320MW Jamshoro coal project in Pakistan.
The bank declared in 2018 a shift to clean energy, backing US$2 billion worth of investment into renewable energy and energy efficiency, to meet a US$3 billion target for 2020. In March, it also set a target of US$80 billion worth of climate financing by 2030.
The draft new policy states that the lender will help developing nations to “mitigate the health and environmental impact of existing coal-fired power plants and district heating systems through financing of emission control technologies.”
Bank’s support for fossil gas remains
Environmentalists see the new policy as a landmark decision, but are also pushing for the bank to declare that it will abandon funding of other fossil fuels in its final draft.
The draft policy serves as the basis for further consultations with ADB shareholders and the public until June 2021, before the finalised version will be submitted to the board of directors inOctober.
Glenn Ymata, energy campaigner of NGO Forum on ADB, said the bank is still gridlocked to liquified natural gas and gas finance, as well as harmful waste-to-energy incinerator projects, which all contribute to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are expecting that the ADB will continue involving the civil society in finalising the draft because of the climate, environmental, social, and human rights imperatives,” Ymata said.
Greenpeace added ADB must not provide a loophole and opportunities for businesses to impede the transition to renewable energy by replacing coal with fossil gas.
“ADB’s new policy to stop coal financing is a long-delayed and incremental move. Communities throughout Asia have struggled for decades to demand ADB to stop financing dirty energy. While this new policy puts the brakes on coal financing, it still opens doors for fossil gas development,” said Jasper Inventor, programme director, Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
The bank has spent US$4.7 billion financing gas projects in the region, the majority allocated for gas-fired power plants (44 per cent), exploration and extraction (21 per cent), according to the analysis by the Fossil Free ADB coalition and Oil Change International.
Gas expansion was found by scientists to have played a larger role in increasing global emissions than coal in every year between 2013 and 2019.
Tonnes of food scraps collected from restaurants and supermarkets are being converted into electricity under a green energy initiative powering thousands of homes in Perth.
The City of Cockburn has made the waste to energy service a permanent fixture of its general duties, collecting rotting food waste from local businesses and feeding it to a mechanical ‘stomach’ at a nearby fertiliser plant.
The anaerobic digester heats the food, traps its methane gas and feeds the energy into the electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.
Key points:
A giant mechanical stomach is turning tonnes of food waste to energy
The electricity is being fed into the grid, powering 3,000 homes
The City of Cockburn has made the initiative part of its general duties
“Food waste really shouldn’t be thought of as a waste, it should be thought of as a resource,” said the city’s waste education officer, Clare Courtauld.
“It’s really important to take food waste out of landfill because it produces harmful greenhouse gases.
“If global food waste was a country, it would actually be the third-highest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.”
Food scraps are fed to the mechanical stomach around the clock.(Flickr: Taz, CC BY 2.0)
Ms Courtauld said the City had so far recycled 43 tonnes of food waste and saved 81,000 kilograms of CO2 equivalent gasses that would have otherwise entered the atmosphere rotting in landfill.
The $8 million mechanical stomach sits at the Jandakot headquarters of fertiliser company RichGro.
It was the first bio-waste plant of its kind to operate in the southern hemisphere when it opened in 2016.
“Their trucks come in … they tip off the food waste.
“It then goes through a piece of machinery which removes any packaging that might be in with the food waste and any contamination.
“It pulps the food waste up into like a porridge consistency and doses it into a big tank.
The food waste is pulped into a rich slurry and pumped into the digester.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
“This tank then feeds the two digesters … they’re getting fed 24 hours a day.
“As it breaks down, it generates methane gas. We’re capturing that gas and we’re running large generators that combined can produce up to 2.4 megawatts of electricity.”
The plant powers the company’s entire operations and up to 3,000 neighbouring homes, all from food waste.
What goes in, must come out
“Out the back end comes a liquid that is actually certified organic as a liquid fertilizer,” Mr Richards said.
“We sell a percentage of that to farmers and the remaining percentage of it we add into our compost piles.”
The bioenergy plant converts the methane gas from food waste into electricity to feed into the local power grid.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
Some foods are better than others.
“Certainly, you can overdo a good thing — you wouldn’t want too much fats, oils and greases.
“A lot of fruit and vege, starchy, sugary products are good. They produce a lot of energy.”
The City’s waste manager, Lyall Davieson, said there was community appetite for these sorts of initiatives.
“I’ve been in waste for about 25 years,” he said.
“Not so long ago, all we could really do was just recycle a few cans and a bit of steel.
“But now we really have at our disposal lots of options to divert waste from landfill and to recycle.”
The energy created from food waste is fed into the existing electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
Frank Scarvaci, who owns a longstanding independent supermarket in Hamilton Hill, was one of the first businesses to sign up for the service.
He said it was a natural progression for his grocery store after embracing a plastic bag ban and installing solar power.
“I’ve been surprised [at] how the community has accepted the change,” he said.
“I thought [there] was going to be much more resistance in regards to when they scrapped plastic bags, for example — but there was virtually no resistance at all.”
Contamination causes indigestion
While common in Europe, the plant is just one of a few of its kind to be built in Australia.
People living close to the plant in Perth’s southern suburbs wouldn’t even know their homes are being powered by food waste.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
The City of Cockburn said it was not a waste service it would expand to households, because the risk of contamination disrupting the process was too high.
“We do have a machine that does have a certain ability to remove a level of the contamination,” Mr Richards said.
“Can it remove everything? No, it can’t.
“We’ve even had bowling balls come through — you can’t process things like that, in a system like this. It does damage our machinery.”
Bio-energy has a bright future
The bio-energy technology is growing in Australia, with the next logical step in the process to convert the bio-waste into biomethane, which could be fed into the gas grid.
The Federal Government is co-funding a biomethane production facility at a wastewater treatment plant in Sydney’s southern suburbs.
Once online in 2022, the $14 million plant is expected to pump biomethane derived from biogas created by a similar ‘mechanical stomach’ that would meet the gas needs of more than 13,000 homes.
