JOHANNESBURG – When a South African Airways Boeing 737 took off from O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg two years ago, headed for Cape Town, it was powered by an unusual fuel: tobacco.<\/p>\n
South Africa hasn\u2019t yet repeated the jet biofuel feat, but in an effort to cut its climate-changing emissions and promote greener power the country\u2019s researchers are looking for innovative ways to manufacture green aviation fuel at larger scale.<\/p>\n
A new \u201cWaste to Wing\u201d project aims to one day produce a significant share of the country\u2019s aviation fuel from waste plants, including invasive species.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouth Africa produces a large amount of agricultural waste, as well as waste from plantation forestry and waste biomass from alien vegetation clearing programmes,\u201d said Tjasa Bole-Rentel, an energy economics and policy specialist for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the groups involved in the biofuel push.<\/p>\n
So far the effort is a small \u201cproof of concept\u201d project, likely to produce just enough jet biofuel for one more flight, she said.<\/p>\n
But if the technology works, production could be scaled up significantly – perhaps to as much as 15 percent of the aviation fuel used at Johannesburg\u2019s international airport, she said.<\/p>\n
Finding clean fuel for planes, ships and other forms of transport hard to plug into a clean energy grid remains one of the biggest challenges for reducing climate changing emissions.<\/p>\n
But as airlines face increasing pressure to become more sustainable, countries around the world are trying to find solutions, from hydrogen powered barges to, in South Africa\u2019s case, planes that could fly on weeds.<\/p>\n
Scaling up jet biofuel – and making it cost effective – hasn\u2019t been easy, however.<\/p>\n
TOO EXPENSIVE?<\/p>\n
Farmers in South Africa\u2019s Limpopo province today continue growing solaris, a nicotine-free tobacco that produces large amounts of oil and that was used as a feedstock for the country\u2019s first tobacco-powered flight.<\/p>\n
But \u201cthere is no local refining capacity available and the sheer scale of farming needed to make the economies of scale work at this moment in time\u201d is difficult, Merel Laroy, a spokesman for SkyNRG, a Netherlands-based alternative jet fuel supplier, told the Thompson Reuters Foundation.<\/p>\n
One of the lessons learned, she said, is that making the biofuel locally is key.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen there\u2019s no local production capacity, the feedstock must be shipped out of the country and shipped back after refining. This makes the sustainable aviation fuel much more expensive,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The Waste to Wing project, with $1.4 million in funding from the European Union\u2019s SWITCH Africa Green Programme, aims to solve that problem and cut costs and protect agricultural production and forests by using waste to create fuel.<\/p>\n
The effort, a partnership by South African social enterprise Fetola, WWF, and SkyNRG, aims to create a clean jet fuel supply in South Africa, a country with a long history of developing and using alternative fuels.<\/p>\n
As part of the project, 25 small businesses will collect and supply the plant matter needed to make the biofuel – an effort to create jobs in a country with one of the world\u2019s biggest unemployment rates.<\/p>\n
Amanda Dinan, Fetola\u2019s project manager, said the businesses could use invasive plants, collected in environmental restoration projects and currently simply stored or abandoned, as the raw material for jet fuel.<\/p>\n
Such stores of dried plants today can present a wildfire risk in a country suffering drought, so are often purposely burned to avoid that risk, she said.<\/p>\n
But the waste could provide jobs \u201cin its harvesting, collection, pre-treatment and transport,\u201d Dinan told the Thompson Reuters Foundation.<\/p>\n
She and Bole-Rentel said no biomass will be produced for being converted to fuel.
\n\u201cAs the name suggests, the Waste to Wing project will focus on waste biomass\u201d, including leftovers from food and livestock feed production, paper making and furniture production, Bole-Rentel said.<\/p>\n
At the moment, most of the agricultural waste produced in the country is burned, she said.<\/p>\n
In some areas, harvested invasive plants already are being used to produce charcoal or fibrous products such as coffins, but most of the waste is unused, she said, and only that unused supply will be diverted to the jet fuel project.<\/p>\n
PLENTIFUL SUPPLY<\/p>\n
Bole-Rentel said the project was designed to stand up to worsening drought linked to climate change in southern Africa, and ensure food-producing land isn\u2019t used to make fuel instead.<\/p>\n
South Africa still has large swathes of invasive plants to clear, and the weeds are spreading faster than they can be cut back, Dinan said, which means the jet fuel project could both aid that effort and is unlikely to run out of stock to make fuel.<\/p>\n
Sampson Mamphweli, director of the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University, agreed the country has plenty of organic waste.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether they use organic waste, or they plant the biomass for energy, whichever way the project is worth investigating,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
One huge challenge with such projects is the cost of transporting plant waste, so material would need to be sourced as close as possible to where jet biofuel is produced, Mamphweli said.<\/p>\n
And \u201cthe cost of the actual biomass material is also a big factor,\u201d he said. Often, a once useless and free material becomes valuable when there is a use for it, he said.<\/p>\n
Bole-Rentel said it was too soon to get any real picture of how much of South Africa\u2019s aviation fuel needs might be met by the waste-to-fuel project.<\/p>\n
But \u201cour previous research into biomass availability suggests that, technically, there could be enough biomass to meet 100 percent of our aviation fuel demand,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But under current technology the biofuel would need to be blended with conventional jet fuel, meaning the waste technology could supply at best half of the country\u2019s needs, she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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