British Airways, together with Airbus are backing Cranfield University’s pioneering project to harvest algae in order to produce jet fuel in commercial quantities.

The Sustainable Use of Renewable Fuels (Surf) consortium which includes British Airways, Airbus and Cranfield University, was announced at the Aviation and Environment Summit in Geneva.

Surf is based around Cranfield’s ‘Sea Green’ project and will serve as an advisory group supporting the definition, objectives and outcomes of this project. The university already has a pilot facility on campus which is growing and processing algae for bio-fuels but the eventual aim is for Sea Green to be an ocean-based facility for the sustainable production of commercial quantities of biomass for biofuels.

It is envisaged that the first commercial quantities of products from Sea Green will become available within three years.

“Sustainable fuels will play a critical role in reducing the carbon footprint of global aviation by 50 per cent by 2050, delivering substantially lower life-cycle emissions whilst avoiding other environmental impacts,” stated Jonathon Counsell, head of Environment at British Airways.

The Cranfield project follows British Airways’ recent announcement that it plans to establish Europe’s first sustainable jet-fuel plant and to use the low-carbon fuel to power part of its fleet from 2014.

The new fuel will be derived from waste biomass and manufactured in a state-of-the-art facility that can convert a variety of waste materials, destined for landfill, into aviation fuel.

“This project and consortium aim to see how algae could benefit the aviation industry. It will look at ways to grow and harvest naturally occurring species of algae in large volumes and to process these into fuel. Algae grows naturally in sea water and with over 70 per cent of the surface of the earth being water, Cranfield’s Sea Green project is a logical and potentially high yield solution,” added Professor Feargal Brennan, head of Cranfield University’s Department of Offshore, Process and Energy Engineering.

SURF is made up of Airbus, British Airways, Rolls-Royce, Finnair, Gatwick Airport, IATA and Cranfield University.-TradeArabia News Service