UK

University of Sheffield: Creating pioneer fuels

The UK’s first direct air capture plant is being used to pioneer jet fuel made from air.

Meet the UK’s first direct air capture plant

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 CO / year

Application
Jet fuel made from air

Process
Power-to-liquid

Growing a UK SAF industry

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.

A truly scalable sustainable carbon feedstock

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.

Plug and play
Sustainable
High quality
“This installation is hugely exciting for us, and for the world, as we discover more about the potential for decarbonised industrial processes and air transport using novel DAC technology.”
— Professor Mohamed Pourkashanian, Managing Director of TERC

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