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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and today I'm joined by Jasmine Sophie and Alistair to talk about something called e-fuels an alternative type of fuel to traditional hydrocarbon sources and also have a think about how we might be fueling our travel in the future so to start off with Jasmine what's your interest in this as a engineer my
background is sustainability as well as chemical engineering which involves a lot of fuels so I find it really interesting because Aviation sector is like one of the the most heavily polluting sectors globally so it counts to the 2.5 percent of total Global greenhouse gas emissions which is actually more than the UK's total greenhouse gas emissions so it's like a really important sector to Target to meet decolonization goals but at the same time it's a really hard sector to
decarbonize just because the fuel that you use it's really energy intensive so it's quite difficult to replace and also there's a really high demand for flights and it's growing and specifically for like cheaper flights so it's kind of an awkward balance to try to decarbonize because you also want to make flying affordable because people want to fly yeah absolutely lots of competing factors there so over to Sophie I think you come from a slight different background that's
right yeah I'm actually a chemist by training but I feel like I'd probably describe myself more as a generalist um than perhaps a hardcore chemist and my but my background is that I did a bit of a stint in the nuclear industry which came after studying chemistry at Manchester University um but I found that I really wanted to go and do something um that was a bit more in the startup sphere so I did a bit of freelance work and also did some work in music festival sustainability which was really
interesting to see sustainability from a slightly different angle and then I suppose specifically for this chat um my interests are around cop 26 which was a large climate change Festival that happened in Glasgow in November 2021 and I suppose that's where I got that real passion for wanting to to visibly be a part of the solution to helping solve climate change which is where carbon neutral fuels was born and now that's a great segue to talk to Alistair so you're starting a
company or you have started a company with Sophie called calm neutral fuels so do you want to tell us a bit about your background how you got there yeah sure uh so my background is I studied computer science at Imperial College um almost 20 years ago now and after I graduated I ended up starting a cloud computing company in the it sector and I ran that for 15 years which was a nice long run but I've always had a huge interest in energy and in particular nuclear energy as a potential solution
for for climate change and that led me to cop26 where I was campaigning with Sophie on on behalf of the the nuclear world and I've also had an interest in something called power to liquid e-fuels which I came across a number of years ago and Sophie and I had some chats about that and so in September of last year we ended up starting carbon neutral fuels and the plan is to make synthetic low carbon fuels it's great so I'm glad to have you here so that we could talk a bit about
e-fuels and what it means for industry particularly if it's for the aviation industry what I understand of an e-fuel is we've got hydrocarbons that make up most of our usage of fuel around the world 82 of our Global energy use comes from fossil fuels but if we look at the base chemicals they can come from different sources it's quite interesting so when you look at a hydrocarbon it consists of mostly straight chain carbon and hydrogen atoms and when you burn a
hydrocarbon basically it's an exothermic reaction with oxygen where the carbon reacts to form carbon dioxide and the hydrogen reacts to form water vapor and you get energy out which is why it's useful for us but you can actually run that process in Reverse if you use the right technology to take water and carbon dioxide and effectively put that energy back in and you can synthesize these long chain hydrocarbons again so it's kind of like running things in reverse and that's
effectively what a power to liquidy fuel is and the technologies that we would usually use to do that would be an electrolyzer to split the water into hydrogen and you'd also need some carbon capture to carbon to capture the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then you would run the carbon dioxide and the hydrogen through a Fisher troughs reactor and that will sort of combine those atoms together with only water as a waste product and those hydrocarbons can can be anything so you you can make
jet fuel you can make Marine Diesel it's pretty flexible in the process okay that's that's great explanation um and e-fuel is the same as a power two X or power to fuel or is there a different terminology yeah there's a lot of terminology in this field and um the power to X basically describes um quite a few processes so you can do power to methanol for example um and the general idea is you're converting electrical potential energy into chemical stored potential energy so
it's a very energy intensive process because fossil fuels I suppose in a way represent uh Nature's endowment of free energy where over millions of years sunlight fell on the earth photosynthesis converted that sunlight into sugars nature capturing the carbon dioxide in this case and then over millions of years those sugars broke down into um hydrocarbons with without the oxygen which make a fantastic Fuel and all humans have had to done to do is to come along and stick a straw on the ground
and they've got all this free energy but unfortunately that free energy is is causing the the climate to warm up in the form of all this carbon dioxide that's accumulating in the atmosphere and so we really need to find an alternative but if if we're going to do that we we have to put the energy back in and um and that energy has to be low carbon so this power to X process really describes taking as I said electrical energy and converting it to other forms like methanol or or hydrocarbons and so
for you had a interesting status about how much energy that might take yeah that's right and it's actually quite a shock statistic actually so in the UK all of the jet fuel that we consume is 1.5 billion liters which is an extortionate amount and actually if we were to make all of that um using a power to liquid process um it would actually require 35 gigawatts of electricity which is even more electricity than we consume as a UK as the UK population overall that
currently sits at about 30 gigawatts so when we're thinking about the process of converting the whole aviation industry to sustainable fuels we're really talking about massive numbers here it's an interesting challenge because different sectors have specific targets but the aviation sector's been a bit slow they've been certain airlines have put Targets on how much of their Fleet will be powered by sustainable Aviation fuels which encompasses both e Fields
but also like bioderived fuels and other types of alternatives to alternative fuels but recently within the EU so my impact the UK may not impact the UK brexit uh fit for 55 it's a legislation that kind of just like outlines how the EU member states will meet their decarbonization sector and for the aviation sector there's a target for two percent of Jack fuels must be sustainable so that that encompasses like all different types of alternative fuels so two percent must be sustainable
fuels by 2025 and with a target of 70 by
2050. so it's like it's it's an interesting area but it's also like because of there's different governments and policy makers are putting targets I I think we're going to see a lot more companies like Sophie's alistairs um coming into the picture to help the sector decarbonize so I think it's quite interesting so in two years time we we need to have two percent sustainable aviation fuel and then suddenly go from two percent to 70 by 2050 yeah that's another growth yeah
in the UK they've um sat a target of 10 by 2030 and uh that's coming into Force
um in 2025. so that's five years basically yeah why why have we got it's like a lot of change to happen in a short amount of time why haven't Aviation already switched to sustainable aviation fuel they have so like British Airways have done some work the thing is because currently these alternate fuels they're much they're just more expensive than conventional fuels and then the added fuel costing translates into higher airfares which is obviously not good for
your business model if you're an airline yeah absolutely so the the mandates that are coming into Force are going to need some kind of subsidy from the government to bridge that price Gap um and to give you an indication sustainable fuels are typically three to five times more expensive than conventional jet fuel and if you're a Budget Airline fuel is one of your largest costs and so we're probably going to see airfares increase in prices unfortunately as a result of the climate
change legislation there's also reasons like the fact that up until now or up until a few decades ago there wasn't really a need to obviously in terms of climate change there was a massive need to but because this legislation didn't exist there wasn't really that social incentive to drive that change and and also there are there are so many technology developments that happen elsewhere so things like biofuels so just specifically in terms of our power to liquid process a load of other
attention has gone to other projects which are very valuable and it's sort of how do you do that technology LeapFrog um which is where you develop technology and then that propels you onto something else and I think we're only starting to see that pick up speed now yeah absolutely and the UK government is uh doing quite a lot to try and spur on the advancement of these sustainable fuels and they've got something called the advanced fuels fund where they've been awarding
um they have a pot of 165 million pounds which they've been Distributing to to sustainable aviation fuel businesses and that includes uh they have a second window of 55 million from that 165 million pots and they've said that 50 of that they want you mark for power to liquid projects in particular because historically Jasmine touched on this sustainable fuel can also mean biofuels and the department for transport even classifies household waste like your black bin bags as a source of potential
feedstock for these sustainable fuels which is a little bit sketchy because you're taking some carbon that would be sort of buried under the ground and and you're burning and releasing it so it's not truly low carbon but it's slightly less carbon than fossil fuels so they're they're including it I'll just add in that um another reason why Aviation sectors have been a bit slow in comparison with other transport sectors is just because um that technology that you would use is
different to like other modes of transport so like with road vehicles everything's going Electric so but you can't really have an electric airplane because it just wouldn't work it's too heavy it'll never lift it will never take off the ground yeah I heard a fascinating stat that to fly a battery requires more energy than is in the battery due to the weight yeah yeah so I've heard this as a energy payback before for planes electric batteries just don't pay back no it's and also because like
with batteries because one of the keys like something so the ancient ages acted like they were working on how to reduce fuel consumption to reduce their emissions because that was just easier than moving into just alternative fuels also another reason why every internet sector has been a bit slow but um with batteries you're planning to get heavier rather than lighter so that's a issue because it would also you'd have to just like also change the design of the airplane because uh airplanes when
they're stationary are like they do they will Buckle under their own weight just because they are so heavy so they're meant that because they're designed to be in be suspended in the uh and if you can't get your plane to lift off then it's kind of pointless but yeah that's a really good point Jasmine actually because when you're considering this is the whole life cycle of the sustainability of something you need to consider what you're making your your thing from so what are you making a
plane from right through to what fuel is using right through to how are you gonna decommission or you know retire that that vessel um so with different e-fuels there are different things that you need to factor in and accommodate for so so with the power to liquid process it's a drop-in replacement for existing jet fuel so you don't need to to actually change any of that whereas if you think about other options like electrification like hydrogen there's a whole infrastructure change that's
required which this is for another podcast but the sustainability of that is is an interesting question yeah the the cost and the time involved of replacing every plane in the sky with with a mythical electric version or or a potential hydrogen version is it's it's really challenging but with um sustainable fuels they're a drop in replacement so yeah you can literally decarbonize by just switching your fuel supplier you just phone up BP and say see you later and then phone up someone
like us and and hopefully we'll be able to supply you with as much feel as you need why power to fuel instead of Bio sources then or is it just an alternative option you know we can't have all of One Source you know diversify your supply yeah I think we're gonna see all of the above there there are funding that the UK government through the department for Transport Funding all these different approaches and power to liquids are relatively new and it's been quite
difficult to do it historically because there just wasn't the availability of carbon capture technology to capture that CO2 from the air but there's now quite a few companies coming through that have technologies that are approaching uh commercialization levels where you can buy this reasonable price and deploy it in a reasonable time frame and that's kind of what is enabling uh this whole power to X process and the other thing that's worth touching on is is the cost of of the electricity and um
one of the challenges in in Europe and the UK is that there isn't a huge availability of low carbon electricity and a lot of it is supplied through the electrical grid and in the UK the current price is sort of 30 to 40 pounds per kilowatt hour whereas if you look at somewhere like Norway they have incredibly cheap power because of all the hydro and the same is true of Iceland and you can get potentially five pence a kilowatt hour so that's a absolutely huge price difference and the
the cost of these power to liquid fuels is driven uh predominantly by the cost of that electricity so for power to liquids to really take off if you'll excuse the pun in Europe they're going to have to deploy it deploy a lot more uh cheap low carbon electricity and that's actually a reason why Sophie and I are quite um optimistic about small modular nuclear in the future which uh potentially can deliver always on lots of cheap um electricity you touch on an interesting issue actually which is
around social mobility and access to travel access to global travel and I think there's an interesting perspective from um from the industry about who should be paying for the sustainable fuel and for them for the price increase because um globalization is is becoming greater and there's more access to travel for people across the world which is a fantastic thing um but just as a thought exercise who who should in fact be paying for the sustainability of the fuel that we're
using it doesn't seem fair that if we're gonna hike um uh ticket prices up massively that then only the rich have access to to Global Travel so there's sort of a social um conscience piece that as a as a society I guess we all need to have that conversation and work out where the burden of responsibility Falls and it's most likely not going to fall on one particular person or one particular organization or part of the supply chain but where should it fall um and actually the electricity argument
is a very strong one because as Alistair says it's massively that massively influences the price of our product um but if there's opportunity to bring that cost down then it would be more Equitable for a whole host of reasons that's a really interesting point hadn't thought about the sustainability of travel in in a social context and these are such big nebulous problems that we're trying to tackle we're all coming at it from very different perspectives and very
different motivations but fundamentally we'd like to be a part of the solution to climate change we'd like to have a world to live on going forwards we'd like it to be in a fair and just an equal society and it's just how do we how do we get there in the most efficient Fair Speedy way possible one one thing that I find really fascinating about power to liquids is it's a really elegant process whereas some of the other fuels like biofuels have a lot of challenges around them so for example
traditional biofuels that are made from crops you're competing with food crops and that can drive the cost of food up which isn't necessarily ethical and there's also agricultural wastes and runoff into rivers Etc so biofuels have a lot of challenges associated with them I feel like a lot of those challenges were linked more to the first generation of bio fuel sources and that that's being tackled in the second generation third generation which not going to go
to in this episode because that could be a whole nother episode but just you know using poorer quality land that couldn't be used for agriculture could be one of those foils to that problem really yeah other sources of sustainable fuels like um heifer and similar that comes from waste oils and and other things like cooking oil used cooking oil and some of the challenges with that are the limited availability of of the source material um and that's why they're looking at
things like household waste to sustainable fuels because you need this source of carbon and obviously household waste has paper and other things in it which you can potentially convert uh to these sustainable fuels um but I I think generally the the challenge with these fuels like biofuels and heifer and and waste is it's a limited feedstock whereas with the power to liquids process it's uh literally taking CO2 out of the air recycling it turning it back into Fuel and I I find
that quite elegant but it does need a huge amount of cheap energy and that's the key thing Jasmine do you have anything to say about the sustainability on this topic and the social sustainability I think is an interesting point that Sophie brought up because it's a really good question of who was going to pay because ultimately because we are a capitalist Society it will be the um person buying a plane ticket is gonna have to pay I suppose they created the demand for it so why why wouldn't
they oh no but at the same time the consumer does have the power to change the industry so if there is a more bigger demand for a more sustainable flights then you could see a growth in that market and then that could lead to more investment within into a sustainable fuel Technologies which could then bring the market sustainable fuel Market to a point where it is comparable to the price to Conventional fuels and then we can eventually like get to the stage where they basically
you don't need fossil fuels in the aviation sector because y'all turn to Fuels there are they're cheaper if not like the same price so I think it's like an interesting perspective and interesting point because it is because ultimately like it's gonna have to be the um the person buying a plane ticket who's gonna have to pay unless there's like some heavy government subsidies or the airlines willing to invest something to subsidize the subsidized like airfares if they
want to go sustainable because right now like British Airways you do have the option of offsetting your emissions using sustainable Aviation fuels but it's actually really expensive it pretty much will like it can over double the cost of your uh of your Earth yeah and I think that's what I mean about who fundamentally does fit the bill there's two or there's two common arguments to it well one is that you subsidize it through taxes and the downside of that is that everybody including people that
don't fly have to subsidize it and and pay which isn't necessarily Fair on those people that are perhaps taking trains instead for example and the only other option is yeah increase ticket prices I think in these early days when they're trying to spearhead the development and and help companies get started in the sustainable fuel space I think we'll see a blended approach where some airlines are having to increase their ticket prices and the government is is subsidizing some of
these early stage grants just to change tact this is partly fueled because I want to talk about this which is how sustainable is it if we're talking about carbon neutral because we're kind of counting on carbon captured storage which has its own energy challenges as well sustainable in what sense Antonia sorry you know my background you have to be specific I mean because of how much energy is needed to capture carbon uh carbon dioxide income capture processes does
that really stack up when you then need to generate a fuel out of it yeah so like it's kind of like a similar issue to hydrogen because when you actually like work out the actual efficiency it's quite low because you have to put in a lot of energy to then generate a fuel that has actually less megajoules and the megas you put in to make it so like that is an issue that people are addressing but it's just an issue with any kind of synthetic fuel because you're just gonna lose some energy
somewhere sure one thing that I find quite interesting is that we we've done some material and energy balances for our design of our e-fuels plant and the vast majority of the energy about 90 of it goes into the hydrogen production rather than the carbon capture so the energy involved with the carbon capture isn't as bad as you might think are you guys using a solid sorbent direct capture that is a great question Jasmine because we're actually uh looking at a
range of Technologies but I suppose the one in the short term will be that technology where you're using um absorbance and that does mean that there are consumables involved but something that Sophie and I are really excited about is um direct ocean capture Sophie do you want to talk a bit about direct ocean capture so very similar to direct air capture except the location is different shall we say and that is the principle that you would then put a big straw in the middle of the
ocean and you can suck up your carbon dioxide and extract it from your filtered water and then that actually becomes your carbon dioxide feedstock and I suppose the reason why it's a really interesting technology to pursue is because the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is 140 times greater than in the air so if you're talking about efficiencies if you can get that technology up to a level where it performs at the same or even above direct air catcher you've got a real chance of
of being able to capture even more carbon dioxide and therefore that would have a positive impact on the amount of fuel you can make and therefore the amount of conducts that you're taking out of the atmosphere it's a very very low TRL technology at the moment I suppose there are people working on it very clever people doing very clever things but in terms of commercial Readiness it's not quite at the point that direct air capturers or other sources but I would
definitely say watch that watch this space on that one you are bound by location to some extent obviously but then on the flip side it opens up a whole host of opportunities because if you start to go a bit Blue Sky Thinking on it wouldn't it be cool if we could use direct ocean capture on top of all of those abandoned um North Sea oil wells for instance so you've already got the infrastructure there you've got your whole source of carbon dioxide you just need to sort of
retrofit a new plant on top of that and then you've built yourself a new production facility so the possibilities are really exciting with that and it's worth pointing out that the ocean is a huge uh carbon dioxide sink so I think it's 40 of atmospheric CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans and it kind of stays close to the surface which is why you get that 140 times concentration and the nice thing about extracting CO2 from the oceans is that it's an electrochemical process so you
can do it with electrochemistry so you're not needing adsorbance you might need membranes which also wear out Etc but it promises potentially greater efficiencies lower energy requirements and yeah it's quite exciting yeah so just to break it down a bit more so the the direct air capture is fundamentally using different Technologies can you explain the the actual technical steps and how they differ sure so for the direct ocean capture uh when carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans it
forms carbonates and it becomes sort of bound within in the water and it doesn't want to come back out but if you can temporarily acidify a portion of sea water by lowering its pH the carbon dioxide will turn back into a gas and you can use a vacuum degasser and it will just boil out and so what they do is through an electrical electrochemical process push hydrogen ions into a portion of water and that CO2 comes out as for direct air capture we just discovered that we could buy it so I
know it uses adsorbance but not being a massive chemistry nerd about direct air capture and maybe someone else might be able to answer that one yeah sure so I can go over how Direct so in direct as you have air that contains CO2 and basically you're just stripping out a large fraction of that CO2 so indirect I capture this generally two types you have your solid absorbent and your liquid solvent so when the solid sorbent it's more or less like a metal rectangle where you pump air into it and
in the middle there's like you can think of it as bit of like a membrane type of thing it's not actually a memory that's the best way I can kind of like try to describe it and in that membrane uh it has different materials um that that the key material is that you have some chemicals that react with carbon dioxide in the air that basically will make the carbon dioxide bond to it to form another chemical and so the air passes through carbon dioxide gets stripped out because it
bonds to the membrane and then like a less CO2 intensive Airstream flows flows out and so with the carbon dioxide bonded to the chemical you then heat it and put it under some pressure changes to then make that chemical decomposed to release that CO2 and then that CO2 gets sucked out and then you can either use it to make amazing evils or you can also use it for other applications so there are some small plants where you actually use it to enhance Greenhouse productivity
you can also just inject it into the ground so let that solid absorbent liquid absorbance or liquid solvents slightly different process so liquid you it's similar in the first stage where basically you have air that comes into contact with a chemical that will react with the CO2 but in the liquid solvent you have like a liquid stream that's basically removing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so in liquid absorbent it's traditionally potassium hydroxide that reacts with the
CO2 and then that goes through another series of chemical reactions because it's at the very end you have calcium carbonate which you then need to decompose and that will release to carbon dioxide which basically then just gets separated out into a pure stream and then you can do whatever you want with it so that's generally how direct air capture works so what I'm understanding is there's some similar processes happening where we're bonding carbon dioxide to something
preferentially and then finding a way for it to be released whether that's through decomposition or heating up a material is that right yeah yeah generally yeah basically you just need to make carbon dioxide in the in the air react with another chemical to make a new chemical and then you have to do something to that new chemical to make the carbon dioxide be released so that you can capture it okay so I think we understand that and I think we've talked a lot about the technical
uh how any fuel is made um I think so CO2 is quite energetically stable and to turn it back into a fuel you kind of have to smoosh the hydrogen back into the carbon dioxide and you typically need an intermediate step where you convert the carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and so you want to pull off one of those oxygens and a really cool technology that Sophie and I came across is called a solid oxide electrolysis and we need to make hydrogen and an electrolyzer makes
hydrogen but what's really cool about solid oxide electrolyzers is it works by stripping off oxygen so if you pass steam so H2O and you pass in your carbon dioxide CO2 on the other side you end up with Co near carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas which is perfect that's syngas and you can then pass that same gas into what's called a fishertrophs reactor and that has a catalyst typically Cobalt or iron and on the surface of that Catalyst it will start growing these long chain
hydrocarbons and typically what comes out the bottom of the Fisher trust reactor is like this thick waxy solid and you then pass that to a hydro cracker and that can convert that waxy solid into the length of hydrocarbon that you need and you can literally just set the flash point and you can decide whether you want kerosene or diesel or whatever fuel you want to make so for those billionaires trying to do space travel we could also make them have sustainable space fuel
you absolutely could and one of the things that you also need in a rocket is oxygen and the electrolyzer because it's splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen you actually have the oxygen fuel as well that you need for the rocket and Elon did tweet in 2021 that SpaceX is actually looking into making their own jet fuel via carbon capture so yeah if we can make sustainable space travel what else could we possibly do like what how could we actually get out of
traveling so much because ultimately we we could try and make a better fuel or we could try and change our Behavior through other Technologies we could teleport everywhere yeah yeah I quite like VR and I got an Oculus headset last year and a friend came around and we were playing super hot and uh it's it's straight out of the comedy Playbook oh super hot it's amazing uh time slows down if you the slower you move so if you don't move time is halted which is fantastic but my friend had
never played it before and she had the headset on and she was sort of punching the bad guys and she managed to punch my TV which now has this it was a brand new TV as well I moved into a new flat and and got a nice big TV and it has this tiny little scratch which now whenever I watch TV it's just got this little pixel of light bursting out of the TV and makes me a bit sad live VR because it sounds like a negative it's good in the right hands he likes video when people aren't punching
his television half with most people yeah yeah I think teleportation it would be great if we could do that just think about how much time you'd save on travel yeah or like in movies and the Marvel movies like Holograms video calling but like with a hologram oh neural link oh neural link yeah of course Elon Musk again potentially you could hallucinate that you're actually at the destination because some electrodes have stimulated your brain in the right way yeah or it
could be like in Ready Player one where it's all like in a virtual world where we all just live but not quite the Matrix because that would be bad if we're in The Matrix can I just say uh Sophie and I don't want this feature because it's going to reduce demand for a fuel [Laughter] travel see people it's uh it's better for your health or is it just an intermediate you know until until the VR technology is so good that it doesn't feel like we aren't there and we actually do just live in
The Matrix but we don't know what about if it goes the other way you've got so much Tech going on and so many exciting things maybe there's a whole portion of society that just goes nope not interested I'll just walk that's my form of travel and we just go completely the other way so and again that doesn't do us any favors either so happy with it around please I I think there is this sort of fantastic situation we can get to through Innovation and Technology where things like flying can become
sustainable and one of the things that I love about power to liquidy Fuels is we're kind of advancing carbon capture technology and whilst we're using that carbon to make fuel potentially we could sequester some percentage of it into the ground and then if you took a flight it would actually be carbon negative because we would be sequestering some carbon and that could go some way to actually undoing uh this accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere how do you sequester
for the CO2 if you're using that to generate your fuel you would simply pipe 20 of it under the ground or some percentage uh I mean you'd probably be having to do that out of the kindness of your heart or because your customers are paying you to but I see I think it's something Sophie and I would like to do because we're we're socially responsible is isn't sin gas a great chemical building block for other materials so other than fuels as a hydrocarbon we could go into polymer making is that
possible from uh from your process yes yeah yeah it should be I guess with this the options are really just limited by how creative you'd like to get there are so many opportunities to lock carbon in different ways and use it in creative and different and responsible manners it really is just up to Innovation and that's why it's great to be a startup in an industry that is very dominated by large Enterprises because it gives you that creativity and that opportunity to to Champion other ideas so
absolutely it's possible yeah you can make it almost anything and and we have seen companies in this space making uh carbon captured alcohols for example and perfumes and we've also talked about Sophie and I um but because you effectively have a distillation column and anything that's currently made with fossil fuels like Plastics Etc could be made through this process so potentially you could make trainers you could make clothes um the sky is the limit but you do have
to then think about the sustainability of plastics because they they don't have a good track record of being recycled and seem to have a tendency to end up in the oceans unfortunately but there's presumably other chemicals that you can make that do biodegrade and methanol as a fuel for example is fantastic because it does biodegrade in in nature so how does carbon neutral fuels your company fit into to all of this picture sure so we kind of have two paths ahead
of us one is to become a technology company where we integrate these different pieces of the puzzle into a complete system and I think we're leaning towards this uh end goal and ultimately we'd like to make these kind of shipping container sized modules that can be easily transported easily Mass manufactured that enable our customers to make Fuel and what we quite like about that is it's very scalable and if if we're going to solve climate change this needs to be scalable and the aviation fuel
challenge isn't unique to the UK it's a global problem so if we can sell technology globally you and even license IP globally that's very quick whereas the other path afforded to us is to become a fuel supplier and to use this fuel use this technology to make Fuel and sell that fuel direct to customers um that has its challenges uh in the UK as we mentioned with the cost of electricity so I think we're leaning towards the uh approach of of being a technology company what's next where do
you take that idea I suppose it's just about in a way taking one step at a time and the industry is so um newly formed that I guess it can go anywhere and we're currently just working out where we fit into that um in the short term we're currently raising some money to help grow our team and to help set our strategy in motion and actually do the design drawings that would enable us to then go on to construct and build the ethos facility and then within that you have a whole
host of actions like talking to Airlines talking to airports working out where you're going to put your facility so it's sort of everything in a way we're sort of doing everything um and then ultimately we would love in the next couple of years to have a facility a demonstration site that um is outputting aviation fuel and before 2030 wouldn't it be great if we were flying on our fuel so I suppose that's the aim wonderful so I think we've flown all over the place with this
episode we've started off by discussing a method for making e-fuels from water electrolysis and make use of captured carbon dioxide and this is great because it offers the practicalities of existing Technologies and that can help accelerate the transition to sustainable fuels and reduce environmental impacts the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening
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