On Thursday last week, tech company Honeywell and consulting and engineering firm Wood announced their collaboration to launch a tech solution for companies developing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The novel technology will reportedly help these companies to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels, and bring carbon-negative SAF closer to wide scale adoption.
In the collaboration, Honeywell will combine its Ecofining production process (using waste oil, fat and grease to make green jet fuel), with Wood’s hydrogen plant technology. The new method will use Honeywell’s Ecofining byproducts to create renewable hydrogen, which will then be reintroduced into Honeywell’s production process, and will reportedly counter existing issues of food impurities found in current iterations of the fuel, creating a ‘cleaner burning’ fuel. Any carbon dioxide generated in the process of hydrogen production can also be captured for underground sequestration.
The novel method is said to have the potential to reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by 100% when certain feedstocks are used.
“The combination of these technologies from Honeywell and Wood greatly reduces fossil carbon dioxide emissions compared to traditional fuels by using byproducts to provide hydrogen for the Ecofining process,” said Ben Owens, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Sustainable Technology Solutions. “As a result, a renewable fuels refinery can be essentially self-sustaining in hydrogen production while reducing the carbon intensity of the renewable fuels to very low levels.”
“Wood has a rich history of collaborating on technology developments with Honeywell and together we are now producing solutions for the production of carbon-neutral renewable fuels,” added Andy Hemingway, president, energy, optimisation, and innovation, at Wood. “This solution utilises our long-established experience in hydrogen plant technology to help fuel producers reduce operating costs while meeting sustainability goals with proven, reliable and efficient technologies.”
The groups estimate that use of their technologies could remove the equivalent of 34 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2030.
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