Chris Young Rolls Royce engineer questioned at committee in Commons11 Nov 2021 16:04
Mr Robert Goodwill: Thank you very much. Turning to Chris Young, I got the impression from what I have heard already that basically if we can provide enough biofuel or fuel derived from waste or refractory gases, pretty much they will go in the aircraft we have and they will go through your engines. You have done trials and we are good to go. In effect, if we had enough biofuel available, we could do that sooner rather than later. Is that correct?
Chris Young: We certainly could do that sooner rather than later and then I think the challenge is one of scaling up that SAF production. We have talked about taking it from waste and things like that. The route that we are trying to look at is the power to liquid, which basically says I can do direct air capture of carbon dioxide out of the air, taking the carbon dioxide that exists, which has already been emitted, back out of the atmosphere, combining that with an electrolyser for green hydrogen and then use a power source that is clean, like our small modular reactor power source, and combine all of those together into a plant that then basically is completely net zero, because you have taken all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
We are working on looking at that direct air capture technology and integrating that into a plant with a small modular reactor. Early days, but the technology looks feasible. We clearly have lots of expertise in moving large quantities of air very efficiently. That is pretty much what we do to enable flight and we are working with partners looking at the chemistry of capturing the CO2 and with academia around modelling some of the plant interactions and how that might work. Being able to have it and put it in engines is fairly immediate. Scaling up and getting the right technologies to allow us to scale up to have every single flight on sustainable aviation fuel is the challenge.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
