The UK’s first direct air capture plant is being used to pioneer jet fuel made from air.
Good things come in 20-foot packages. In December 2023, we turned on the UK’s first commercial DAC plant — a shipping container which uses water and renewable electricity to recover 50 tonnes of CO₂ from the air each year.
The plant was bought by the University of Sheffield’s Translational Energy Research Centre (TERC), a world-leading zero-carbon energy research institution, in a first-of-a-kind UK project producing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from air. By validating and certifying the end-to-end production of this fuel, TERC seeks to rapidly bring it to market.
Deployment
2023
Location
Sheffield, UK
Time to Deliver
7 months
Capacity
50 tons of CO₂ / year
Application
Jet fuel made from air
Process
Power-to-liquid
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) offers one of the safest solutions for rapidly decarbonising aviation in the near term — reducing the carbon emissions of flying by up to 80%. These fuels reduce the emissions of flying by lowering the fossil content of jet fuel. To unlock SAF’s potential to deliver Net Zero, production needs to scale now. Yet, none of the fossil-free carbon sources currently used to create them are adequate for industrial-scale production.
Direct air capture (DAC) is increasingly recognised as one of the few solutions able to provide UK SAF producers with a scalable feedstock of fossil-free carbon. By tapping into the CO₂ abundantly available in our atmosphere and using it in a power-to-liquid process, TERC seeks to pioneer a fuel with an ultra-low carbon intensity that can be scaled to meet the UK’s 2030 SAF production targets.
We partner with pioneering CO₂ users, project developers, engineers, and scientists around the world to turn historic carbon waste into new climate value.