Biojet fuel company Fulcrum plans to open a waste to energy facility in the US that will convert municipal waste into a low carbon, renewable jet fuel.
The facility will use research developed by oil and gas company BP and chemical company Johnson Matthey (JM), which convert synthesis gas generated from municipal solid waste into long-chain hydrocarbon molecules that make up diesel and jet fuels.
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Fulcrum has secured the license to the technology and expects to convert 159,000 tonnes of municipal waste into 41.6 million litres of fuel each year, the equivalent of more than 180 return flights between London and New York.
BP’s head of group research Angelo Amorelli said BP first became interested in the technology, called Fischer-Tropsch (FT), in the 1980s while looking to turn gas into liquid fuel.
“The breakthrough came five or so years ago, when we started to explore the potential for our FT process to turn biomass into fuels,” Mr Amorelli said.
He explains that JM redesigned the reactors which looked like baked beans cans filled with the catalyst, creating ‘cans tech’.
”BP then changed the recipe for the catalyst and, by combining that with the’ baked beans’ reactors, we trebled the productivity and halved the cost of building the technology compared to traditional FT reactors,” he said.
Image Credit: BP