Out of thin air: The synthetic fuel promising an emissions-free future for flying

Guinness record holder Zero Petroleum is set for take-off with the opening of a tech centre near Oxford

The future of aviation could be about to take off from a small business park in the English countryside, where a nascent technology that creates fuel from air and water has already broken records and is now eyeing a mass market.

A 20-minute flight above Bicester airfield just over two years ago showed Zero Petroleum's potential, and landed the developer and its Royal Air Force partners a Guinness World Record for the first successful flight powered entirely by synthetic fuel.

“We had a theory to prove as to whether this synthetic fuel could be used in aviation and particularly military aviation,” Air Commodore Jez Holmes, head of the RAF Rapid Capabilities Office, told The National. “And we needed to capture the attention, so what better way than to set in place a project that would actually push us to fly an aircraft.

The synthetic fuel maker Zero Petroleum opened its new technology centre, Plant Zero. 1 in the rural countryside this week.

The founders freely admit the processes involved in making synthetic fuels have been around for some time. One hundred years ago, two German scientists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, invented a method of producing synthetic fuel from coal.

'We need to just go do it ourselves’

What is new is that entrepreneurs are turning to the concept to meet the climate challenge. Zero Petroleum has been firing on all cylinders ever since it was founded by former Formula One engineering guru Paddy Lowe, who worked for Mercedes and Williams, and Imperial College's Prof Nilay Shah.

“I got together with Nilay Shah, who is a very renowned professor in chemical engineering,” Mr Lowe told The National.

“The point we discussed was ‘was anybody doing this already?’ We concluded that very few were and none commercially. The follow-on conclusion was, ‘well we need to just go do it ourselves’.

Nowadays, a handful of companies worldwide use the Fischer-Tropsch process principles to make synthetic fuels from air and water.

The idea is relatively simple, although the engineering behind it is more complicated.

Carbon dioxide is removed from the air through carbon capture. Hydrogen is then taken out of water molecules and the two are combined to make hydrocarbons, the compounds found in oil, gas and coal. Zero then uses these hydrocarbons to make different kinds of fuel – petroleum, aviation fuel and diesel.

“We at Zero didn't invent fuel synthesis,” Mr Lowe told the National.

“But we realise its tremendous future at scale, in a world where we need to move to a fully circular system energy, rather than the linear one we have with fossil fuels.”

Zero says its synthetic fuels are 100 per cent carbon neutral, because the amount of carbon dioxide captured to make the fuel is the same amount that is emitted upon combustion.

However, to be fully net zero, the process of manufacturing needs to be carbon neutral, which would involve the use of green hydrogen and direct air capture. Plant Zero. 1 will be powered through solar panels on the facility's roof.

Synthetic fuels should not be confused with biofuels, the best known examples of which are ethanol and biodiesel. There is also green diesel, which is made from algae and other plant sources, and biogas, which is methane derived from animal waste.

Any engine that currently uses fossil fuels can use Zero's synthetic fuels. In fact, Zero points out, its products are cleaner than fossil fuels, because they do not contain the sulphur and other pollutants that are emitted when fossil fuels are ignited.

It means the potential applications of Zero's fuels are limited only to anything that currently uses fossil fuels.

“One of the big advantages of our technology versus some of the competitors we have is that we can configure to any fuel type. So, we can create gasoline, jet fuel and diesel Ý it's up to us,” Zero's commercial director, Prasanna Kannan, told The National.

“The strategic thinking is jet fuel is a good place to start, because the need there is greatest. The aviation sector is really aware of the issue, because planes cannot be electrified and we don't think hydrogen planes are going to be feasible anytime soon. And even if you could electrify planes, how would you charge them at the airport?”

For Zero right now, it's all a question of scalability. The Guinness record proved to the world that the science works. The next challenge is being able to produce the fuel commercially. A report by the prestigious Royal Society this week asked a series of questions about the technology, not least that it would require considerable renewable energy inputs and pointed out that the contrails of jets would still contribute to the planet-warming effect.

The newly opened facility near Bicester, just north of the city of Oxford will be able to produce about 35 litres of fuel at the outset. That's a start down the road to getting certification from the various authorities. Beyond that, and with enough capital behind the project, scaling up can take off.

The Plant Zero. 1 prototype production facility is going to “prove that it's possible to scale this technology and that's where we are really interested”, Air Commodore Holmes told The National.

“Imagine the amount of fuel the Royal Air Force uses every year. Let’s prove that this technology could be scaled for delivery for the RAF.”

Before founding Zero with Prof Shah, Mr Lowe had a highly successful career in Formula One, including a record-breaking year in 2016 when, as technical director for Mercedes, he led the team to 19 wins out of 21 races.

“I had to take risks every day,” he told The National.

“If you don't take a risk in Formula One in your car development, you will lose. So you have to take risks every day in terms of your use of time, your use of resources to deliver winning performance to the car, and you have to back the good projects and not back the bad ones.”

In many ways, what Mr Lowe is doing with Zero and synthetic fuels is similar to what he was doing in Formula One – pushing boundaries. Some of the innovations in power-braking and suspension technologies that he was responsible for in Formula One were so ground breaking that they were banned at the time.

“One of our teams in the company is actually called the performance team, quite distinct from the chemistry team. They are tasked with improving performance, efficiency and quality, day by day, in exactly the same way we delivered horsepower or aerodynamic downforce in Formula One.

“Those are also relentless targets in Formula One for context. So, actually it's very similar.”

Mr Kannan, certainly feels that the company and its unique synthetic fuel process will appeal to investors.

“I think once you are aware that, apart from road cars which can be electrified, there is no solution, bar liquid fuels. So it's either fossil or synthetic – there’re only two games in town, he told The National.

“The whole world is acutely aware of climate change and carbon emissions, and we're trying to provide a positive message and a positive outlook for future where synthetic fuels can replace fossil and alleviate the carbon emission problem, yet still allow us to live the lives we live today without having to rip out huge amounts of infrastructure.”

In business, big ambitions usually mean big capital requirements and Zero is no exception. But with a representative in Houston and a satellite office in Los Angeles, expansion into the United States seems on the agenda.

Mr Lowe appreciates the “most significant challenges are around capital and raising the necessary funding to scale the industry”.

Early investors though, some of whom were at the Plant Zero. 1 opening this week, may have had the same sense of history as those who gathered at the city pharmacy in Wiesloch in Germany in August 1888 to watch Bertha Benz refill the tank of the first car as it took its maiden trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim.

Mr Lowe told The National that potential investors should be considering synthetic fuels and Zero's 'reinvention of fuel, because it is something they will “look back upon in years to come as one of the largest transitions within the Industrial Revolution”.