Olive Pits Fuel Flights from Seville

Olive pits, used cook­ing oil and other veg­etable remains were con­verted into bio­fuel for more than 200 air­planes that flew from Seville air­port at the end of November.

According to Cepsa, the bio­fuel man­u­fac­turer, flights from six sep­a­rate air­lines used 4.5 per­cent of the sus­tain­able avi­a­tion fuel in their tanks. The European-wide goal for sus­tain­able avi­a­tion fuel incor­po­ra­tion is two per­cent by 2025.

The com­pany said the ini­tia­tive avoided 200 tons of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. Overall, they argue that replac­ing jet fuel with bio­fuel would reduce emis­sions from avi­a­tion by up to 90 per­cent.

Most jet fuel is kerosene based with var­i­ous addi­tives to pre­vent con­geal­ing, lower the freez­ing point and raise the flash point.

“We have seen that it is not nec­es­sary to make any changes in air­craft engines or in the sup­ply sys­tems of air­ports or air­craft to embrace this type of bio­fuel,” Javier Gándara, pres­i­dent of the national air­lines asso­ci­a­tion, told local media. ​“It is pos­si­ble to mix sus­tain­able fuel with con­ven­tional kerosene.”

According to Our World in Data, a non-profit, fly­ing accounted for about 2.5 per­cent of global car­bon diox­ide emis­sions and 1.9 per­cent of total green­house gas emis­sions before the start of the Covid-19 pan­demic.

The orga­ni­za­tion esti­mated that avi­a­tion pro­duced 1.04 bil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide alone in 2018.

Carlos Barrasa, Cepsa’s com­mer­cial and clean energy direc­tor, said the project plays an impor­tant role in the green tran­si­tion of the avi­a­tion sec­tor and would cre­ate new jobs in the region.

He said the com­pany plans to pro­duce 2.5 mil­lion tons of bio­fuel at its plant in south­west­ern Andalusia, of which 800,000 tons would be used for jet fuel.

Barrasa esti­mated that the cur­rent bio­mass gen­er­a­tion in the autonomous com­mu­nity and the world’s largest olive-grow­ing and olive oil-pro­duc­ing region could cover about 10 per­cent of avi­a­tion fuel demand from Seville air­port.

According to Tobi Pardo, the direc­tor of avi­a­tion and asphalt pro­duc­tion at Cepsa, the main lim­it­ing fac­tor in the wide­spread adop­tion of bio­fu­els for avi­a­tion is cost. He esti­mated bio­fuel pro­duc­tion costs two or three times more than tra­di­tional jet fuel.

Despite these lim­i­ta­tions, Cepsa expects to pro­duce enough bio­fuel to cover around 400,000 kilo­me­ters of flights from par­tic­i­pat­ing air­lines, a total of 400 and 500 fly­ing hours.

• EFE
• Diario de Sevilla
• Our World in Data