Neil Grundon, Chairman of Grundon Waste Management, says the focus on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is creating an “unnecessary diversion” for the waste industry and suggests the real solution lies with airline engine manufacturers.
According to airlines around the world, recent developments in flux capacitors should soon see us flying around the world on the contents of the average family dustbin.
Their scientists admit that conventional fuels will be used to achieve the first 88 miles an hour needed for light in the flux capacitor to reach a steady stream and levers are ready to be deployed for time travel.
This is only phase one of the SAF project – phase two will deploy domestic fridge-style cold fusion reactors that will negate the use of any fuels other than household waste (which can be used as simply as tossing away a banana skin), as a “drop-in” replacement fuel.
You may be thinking you’ve heard this all before – back in the 1980s when Marty McFly and Dr Emmett Brown attempted similar in their revered “documentary” Back to The Future.
Apparently, governments around the world are so convinced by the technology that they are forming “Jet Zero Councils” to promote their childhood fantasies.
I’m joking of course, but surely I’m not the only one who habitually chokes on his coffee whilst reading the latest “PR guff” about SAF.
The UK Government talks about SAF being “an important part of the strategy to decarbonise air travel” and the Department for Transport (DfT) policy supports projects seeking to convert waste into SAF.
It has an SAF mandate starting 1 January 2025, which it says will “encourage the innovation of advanced fuels that can generate greater emission reductions and the diversification of feedstocks to reduce dependencies on scarce resources…”
Part of the plan seems to include a reliance on hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) process, albeit until other types of SAF also become commercially viable.
If this happens, then beware of the law of unintended consequences. When prices for these alternative fuels inevitably soar due to a sudden increase in demand from the aviation industry, those increases will reverberate throughout the entire transport industry, including our own waste collection vehicles.
I am all for exploring sustainable fuels (we’ve been doing it for years), but I have a theory.
Perhaps we should leave new-generation aviation fuels to those who understand the complexities better than we do.
Perhaps we should leave new-generation aviation fuels to those who understand the complexities better than we do.
By that I mean engine manufacturers and engineers who understand the demands of keeping an aircraft flying using electricity and or hydrogen propulsion.
Instead, however, what I see is the aircraft industry spending more time running endless SAF conferences and commissioning reports, than it does considering how it could actually make a real-world difference by focusing its teams on a switch away from fossil fuels.
Which brings me back to my comment about diversionary tactics. In keeping us all thinking and talking about what “might be” possible, no one is asking questions of engine manufacturers about what they are actually doing to solve the problem.
Or maybe Boeing has its hands full reading quiz questions to its two astronauts currently stuck in space for another five months…
As yet, the only realistic prospect I can see for making fuels from waste (and let’s remember that we already do this in the form of electricity), is to capture the CO2 post-combustion from Energy from Waste (EfW) plants and use it to manufacture methanol chemically.
I’m all for decarbonising waste management – we’re already streets ahead in that field – and I feel that perhaps we should crack on with our plans before we all head into the departure lounge for destinations unknown.
