Transcription
A transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to New York [music] and back releases about 2 tons of CO2 per passenger, not the whole plane, per person. Planes can't run on batteries, hydrogen isn't ready, and air traffic is growing at over 4% every year. So, for decades, scientists have been chasing the same question. What if you could make jet fuel that works in existing engines, but comes from something that absorbs CO2 instead of releasing it?
A team of European scientists just answered that question. They grew this, microalgae, single-celled organisms the size of a dust particle, and turned it into jet fuel that drops straight into existing aircraft. No engine changes, no new infrastructure. Their fuel cuts aviation CO2 by 80%.
You've probably heard of biofuels, cooking oil, crops, and agricultural waste converted into fuel. The problem is that they compete with food. They need farmland, and there [music] simply isn't enough of it to fuel global aviation. But microalgae are a completely [music] different category. They don't need farmland, they don't need clean water. The only things they need to thrive are sunlight, water, CO2, and nutrients. That's it. Their oil yield per hectare is four times higher than oil palm, the most productive food crop on Earth, and 15 times higher than that of rapeseed. A traditional crop takes up to a year to harvest. Algae, every 1 to 2 weeks.
So, why aren't we already flying on it? Because growing algae at an industrial scale costs a fortune. >> [music] >> Nutrients, temperature control, water systems, processing, the costs stack up before you've made a single liter of fuel. That's the wall every algae company has crashed into, until one team decided to stop paying for those inputs at all. ExxonMobil spent $300 on algae fuel research and eventually walked away in 2023. The company they backed filed for bankruptcy 2 years later. Dozens of startups, [music] hundreds of millions in investment, all hit the same wall, the cost of growing algae at scale.
The EU team behind SusAlgaeFuel decided to attack that problem from a completely different angle. The SusAlgaeFuel project brings together nine organizations across five European countries, >> [music] >> and their key insight was almost embarrassingly simple. The most expensive inputs for growing algae are CO2 and nutrients. >> [music] >> So, what if you got both for free from someone else's waste?
Just 20 km from the University College Dublin lab is a company called Bia Energy. They take in food waste, [music] agricultural residues, and organic material, and convert them into 120 gigawatt hours of biogas per year through anaerobic digestion. That process [music] produces two byproducts that almost everyone discards, carbon dioxide and a nutrient-rich liquid called digestate. [music] For microalgae, those waste products are exactly what they need to grow. The SusAlgaeFuel team pipes both [music] directly into their cultivation system. The algae absorbs the CO2, consume the nutrients, and multiply. What they've created is a closed loop. The biogas plant's [music] rubbish becomes the algae farm's fuel, and costs drop on both sides simultaneously, a win-win for the waste industry, and of course, a win for aviation.
So, you've grown your algae. Now, what? Once they reach peak oil content, the algae are harvested and dewatered, leaving a dense, oil-rich biomass. That oil gets extracted, then sent through hydroprocessing. Hydrogen reacts with the algae oil under high pressure, >> [music] >> converting the fatty acids into clean hydrocarbon chains. The result is a fuel chemically almost identical to conventional jet kerosene.
Now, you might ask, does algae fuel release CO2 when it burns? Well, yes, it does. But here's what makes it fundamentally different from fossil kerosene. That CO2 was never underground. [music] The algae pulled it out of the atmosphere while it was growing. When the fuel burns, it returns that borrowed carbon, so nothing new is added to the system. Whereas fossil kerosene is a one-way door. It releases carbon locked underground for millions of years.
In 2025, a new EU law mandated that at least 2% of all aviation fuel in Europe must be sustainable, rising to 70% by 2050. [music] Airlines have no choice but to find new feedstocks, and the world doesn't produce nearly enough cooking oil and animal fat to fill [music] that gap. Algae is the one feedstock that can genuinely scale. No farmland, no fresh water, no food competition. The biology is exceptional, the science is proven. The companies that tried to brute-force [music] it failed. That's a real warning. But SusAlgaeFuel isn't brute-forcing anything. They're building a closed loop from waste that already exists. That's a fundamentally smarter game. The science works, the biology works. [music] The only thing left to solve is the economics, and from what I've seen, that race is already underway.