The BA owner holds positions with green fuels companies to ensure they meet their targets of flying aircraft with sustainable, low-emissions aviation fuel.
Consolidated International Airlines Group will announce today that it has acquired a stake in a potential bioethanol producer. The size of the stake was not disclosed, but the group is pumping £4.4m into privately owned Nova Pangea Technologies, based near Redcar in North Yorkshire.
Nova Pangea will use the funds to build a plant to produce bioethanol from agricultural waste and wood waste as feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel, which will in turn be produced by LanzaJet. It will be Nova Pangaea’s first commercial-scale waste-to-fuel production facility and the first of its kind to be built in Britain.
The project is part of the FTSE Group’s 100 airline investment program in sustainable aviation fuels, which at the end of last year amounted to $865 million and represents a quarter of the 1.25 billion liters per year of sustainable aviation fuel it will need in 2030.
The owner of British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus has taken a stake in LanzaJet, a US company that has pledged to produce sustainable aviation fuel in Britain as part of its alliance with the airline group in an initiative called Project Speedbird.
The BA owner has adopted the proposed British mandate that planes should fly on at least 10 percent sustainable aviation fuel by 2030. This would require 1.5 billion liters of sustainable aviation fuel annually in Britain. World production today does not exceed 450 million.
sustainable aviation fuel It is seen as the only viable way to decarbonize the long-haul aviation and large aircraft industry; Electric and hydrogen technologies are seen as solutions only for smaller, shorter-range aircraft.
Luis Gallego, 54, CEO of the airline group, noted that his business was going in a different direction than, say, the auto industry, where brands had done little to invest in charging infrastructure for battery electric vehicles. He said sustainable aviation fuels were “the only realistic option for long-haul airlines to decarbonise, which is why investment in this area is so important.”
Nova Pangea, whose name is “New World” (Pangea was the giant prehistoric supercontinent), says construction of its plant will begin this year.
