Making jet fuel from human waste: ‘It’s a mess society can’t stop making’
It is hard to believe but now it is a fact. A new aviation company has developed a type of jet fuel using only human waste.
Chemists at a Gloucestershire lab have turned waste into kerosene.
“We wanted to find a really cheap feedstock that was abundant and of course excrement abundant,” said James Highgate, CEO of Firefly Green Fuels.
Tests conducted by the international aviation regulator have shown that the oil is about the same as standard fossil jet fuel.
The Firefly team worked with Cranfield University to assess the carbon emissions of the fuel. They concluded that firefly fuel has a 90 percent lower carbon footprint than standard jet fuel.
James Highgate has been making low-carbon fuels in Gloucestershire for the past 20 years. The new fuel, he says, is chemically similar to fossil-based kerosene but contains “no fossil carbon, it’s a fossil-free fuel.”
“Of course there will be energy use (in production), but when you look at the life cycle of the fuel, the 90 percent savings (of carbon emissions) is impressive, so yes we have to use energy,” he added. But this is very little compared to fossil fuel production.’
Air travel and carbon emissions
Globally, air travel contributes about two percent of carbon emissions, and these carbon emissions further exacerbate climate change.
Reducing carbon emissions from aviation is one of the most difficult challenges. Electric airplanes are also being developed to reduce carbon emissions.
A British company has said that by 2026, it will develop a ship that runs on electricity and hydrogen and can carry a dozen people at a time.
So finding ways to make fossil-free, environmentally friendly kerosene is like a global treasure hunt.
On a small farm in Gloucestershire 20 years ago, James Highgate began converting rapeseed oil into ‘biodiesel’ for cars and trucks.
His company, Green Fuels, now sells equipment that converts cooking oil into biodiesel worldwide and has customers all over the world.
He then began his research on how to make a fuel that has low carbon emissions. They also tried waste oil, food waste and even agricultural scraps.
Then they experimented with human waste. He conducted this experiment together with Dr. Sergio Lima, a chemist at Imperial College London.
Together, they developed a process that turns feces into energy.
According to him, first he created ‘bio-crude’. It looks like oil, it is thick and dark and chemically has the same properties as crude oil.
“What we are developing here is a fuel that has very low carbon emissions,” says Dr. Sergio Firefly, who is also a director at Green Fuels.
When Dr. Lima first saw the results, he was thrilled.
“It’s very interesting because it was produced from a sustainable feedstock (waste), which we’re all contributing to.”
He gave me a tour of his laboratory, which has a small version of the large fractional distillation columns used in oil refineries.
This column does the same thing. In this, the liquid is heated and then different gases are separated at specific temperature and precise amount of different fuel is obtained.
“This is our biofuel,” he says with a smile. It’s amazing to see the fuel you get at the end.
This bio-kerosene (kerosene) is now being independently tested at the German Aerospace Center’s DLR Institute of Combustion Technology, an institute working with Washington State University.
The Institute at the University of Sheffield, which is helping to develop sustainable aviation fuels in the UK, will investigate this further in the future.
Preliminary results have confirmed that the chemical composition of the fuel is close to that of A1 (A1) fossil fuels.
The UK Department of Transport has given the team a £2 million grant for further research on the subject.
It is ‘important’ to reduce carbon emissions
They have made kerosene in a test tube in the laboratory, but the time is far from when their kerosene can replace the fuel currently in use.
James Highgate has calculated. According to their calculations, a person produces enough waste in a year that four to five liters of bio-jet fuel can be made from it.
It would require an annual waste of 10,000 people to take a passenger plane from London to New York and then another 10,000 people a year to return.
The UK’s current demand for aviation fuel would only be able to meet 5% of the country’s total waste.
It sounds like a lot less, but he says, “It’s very interesting.”
According to the legal mandate, sustainable aviation fuel is required. Half of this we can accomplish with stool.
Fuels that are produced using sources that do not contain fossils are called sustainable aviation fuels.
It emits the same amount of carbon dioxide as standard jet fuel, but because the plant from which it is made uses carbon dioxide, experts say it has 80% less carbon emissions than using fossil fuels. 90% decrease.
Environmental activists stress that people should reduce air travel. But they support making fuel from waste.
As Kate Hewitt, policy director of the Aviation Environment Federation, has said, ‘Human waste is perhaps the one waste that society cannot stop making.’
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency has said that sustainable aviation fuels are “critical to ending aviation’s carbon emissions.”
This was demonstrated recently by the famous British businessman Sir Richard Barson when he traveled from London to New York on a flight that was powered entirely by fuel derived from oil and corn.
But only 0.1% of the fuel used in aviation today is ‘sustainable’.
Even James Highgate’s 5% target looks huge by comparison and he is using a feedstock that no one wants but is made everywhere.
He says that although it is developed in the UK, it will be in demand globally. Now the company is raising funds to build a factory to demonstrate it.
James Highgate explains that ‘the opportunities in densely populated cities are enormous. We can produce huge amounts of fuel.’