Fluor Designing LanzaJet's UK Sustainable Aviation Fuels Production Plant
Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) producer LanzaJet has contracted American firm Fluor Corp. to handle front-end engineering and design for its future SAF production hub in North Yorkshire, England.
Project Speedbird is a joint development between LanzaJet and British Airways. The project under development also involves numerous other partners including Sembcorp Utilities, Technip Energies and the government of the United Kingdom.
Located in Teesside near the Sembcorp-owned Wilton International chemical complex, Project Speedbird is planned to produce 90,000 metric tons of SAF and renewable diesel annually. These fuels will be refined from second-generation ethanol itself produced from agricultural residues and woody biomass.
Texas-based Fluor Corp. has been an engineering, procurement and construction contractor on many energy projects throughout its century-plus history, including natural gas, coal-fired, nuclear and renewable energy power plants. Among its biofuels work includes the Madera Biomass site in California.
“Project Speedbird marks a pivotal advancement in the global effort to decarbonize aviation,” said Mike Alexander, group president for project execution at Fluor, in a statement. “By accelerating the adoption of sustainable fuel technologies, this project will help redefine the future of flight. Fluor is proud to bring our engineering and design expertise to this visionary initiative.”
Sustainable aviation fuel is produced as a lower-carbon alternative to conventional jet fuel, but is typically blended into traditional stocks. It is created from a variety of organic feedstocks, such as seed oils or waste food, and reduces the methane impact of those.
British Airways will utilize the SAF to reduce carbon emissions by approximately 230,000 tons annually, equivalent to the emissions from 26,000 domestic flights.
LanzaJet also opened its first ethanol-to-SAF production plant in April 2024 in Georgia. The Freedom Pines Fuels facility is designed to produce 10 million gallons of SAF and renewable diesel per year.
“Project Speedbird is the next commercial scale facility in our portfolio that LanzaJet is developing, working closely with British Airways,” said Jimmy Samartzis, CEO of LanzaJet. “It is an important step in the continued scale-up of our leading sustainable fuels technology.”
Among LanzaJet's investors include Southwest Airlines and Microsoft. The company hopes to build Project Speedbird by 2027 and produce SAF at full capacity by 2028.
About the Author
EnergyTech Staff
Rod Walton is senior editor for EnergyTech.com. He has spent 17 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist.
Walton formerly was energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World. Later, he spent six years covering the electricity power sector for Pennwell and Clarion Events. He joined Endeavor and EnergyTech in November 2021.
He can be reached at [email protected].
EnergyTech is focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids.
Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.