ALTALTO: ANOTHER WAY

British Airways is one of the investors in a proposed SAF facility at Immingham, Humberside. Called Altalto (altus being Latin for “high”, and “alter” a nod to “other”, in recognition of alternative aviation fuels), it is the brainchild of Velocys, an Oxfordshire-based sustainable fuels technology provider, which aims to demonstrate its technology on a large scale. The plant, which will produce SAF from a variety of waste materials, including household waste and woody biomass, could open as early as the middle of the decade, according to Velocys chief executive Henrik Wareborn.

Since there are pipelines from the area going to, for instance, Manchester airport, the SAF can be added into that and used by airlines at the airport. Those carriers that have used and paid for the SAF will be exempted from paying a carbon penalty, and those that have not will have to pay a penalty for not using it, as part of the proposed EU mandate on SAF (see main article). As Wareborn puts it: “The level of the penalty will very quickly be equal to the highest cost – including the cost of importing SAF from abroad, since there will be a shortage of SAF for some time, so securing domestic SAF will be an advantage for UK airlines.”

The Altalto plant is designed to process 600,000 tonnes of municipal waste, and it has applied to join the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) carbon capture and sequestration cluster. The NEP has been formed to develop offshore carbon dioxide transport and storage infrastructure in the UK North Sea, with BP as lead operator along with partners Eni, Equinor, National Grid, Shell and Total. The infrastructure will serve both the proposed Net Zero Teesside (NZT) and Zero Carbon Humber (ZCH) projects that aim to establish decarbonised industrial clusters in Teesside and Humberside.