Quantas and Solena cooperate on biojet fuel

Australian airline Quantas and US biomass fuel company Solena could form a £200 million biojet fuel joint venture using waste to produce jet fuel.
The bio-jet fuel joint venture is expected to be announced officially this month, according to UK newspaper The Guardian.

Last year, Solena and British Airways formed a partnership to build a waste-to-energy facility in London to covert a variety of waste materials destined for landfill, into aviation biofuel. The biojet fuel could be ready for use from 2014.

The self-contained biofuel plant, likely to be sited in east London, UK, will convert 500,000 tonnes of waste per year into 16 million gallons of biojet fuel.

The bio-jet fuel will be produced by feeding waste into a high temperature gasifier, producing BioSynGas. A process known as Fischer Tropsch then converts the gas into biofuel to produce biojet fuel and bionaphtha. Bionaphtha is used as a blending component in petrol and also as a feedstock for the petrochemicals industry.

The Fischer Tropsch tail gas can also be used to produce 20 MW of excess electricity for export to the national grid or converted into steam to be used in a district heating system.