Nova Pangaea Technologies is working to provide cost-effective sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for commercial use in the UK, said Sarah Ellerby, CEO, at the Sustainable Skies World Summit 2023.

Speaking to FINN, she said: “We’ve developed a process called Refnova, and what we do is we take agricultural waste or woody agricultural waste, what we call lignocellulosic waste. These are our waste feedstocks that are non food derived, and we convert those into sustainable sugars and biochar. Sugars are then fermented to what we call 2G ethanol. That 2G ethanol is that critical unlock or one of those critical pathways to unlock SAF.

“We have a demonstration unit at Wilton International, we’re moving that demonstration unit and we’re scaling that out into commercial production and accelerating our pathway to production of that … 2G SAF.

“So we are in the midst of raising finance for Nova Pangaea to be able to deliver that. We’ve also got the joint development agreement with British Airways and Lanzajet to deliver Project Speedbird, so that’s over 100 million litres of SAF in the UK, and that will require just over 190 million litres of ethanol.

“We have our hands full with our with our two projects. First is delivery of our first of a kind plan to the UK. And then of course Project Speedbird as well.”

Project Speedbird

Project Speedbird can transform agricultural and wood waste taken from sustainable sources into 102 million litres of SAF per year and British Airways intends to offtake all SAF produced at the facility to help power some of its flights

The SAF produced at the facility would reduce CO2 emissions, on a net lifecycle basis, by 230,000 tonnes a year. This is the equivalent emissions of approximately 26,000 British Airways domestic flights. Overall, Project Speedbird has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 770,000 tonnes a year.
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