The chief executive of green aviation fuel refinery developer, Velocys, has told how he is excited and energised by the £7 million share issue.
The funding, from new and existing businesses, complements a £2.8 million injection from high profile partners Shell and British Airways, and will help complete pre-front end engineering and design works and analyse results from a major technology test in the US.
Henrik Wareborn – no stranger to the City having been global head of commodities trading at France’s second largest banking group, Natixis – spelled out how the money will be spent and underlined his confidence in the team delivering the proposal for the South Humber Bank in a broadcast with .
He said: “In addition to completing the pre-engineering work done for the project before you go to the detail, the finer bits of the project, it also allows us to strengthen our intellectual property portfolio. Like every technology company, we need to do that constantly to find new improvement claims and to extend the maturity and scope of our IP portfolio of patents.
“We also have a lot of work to do – post-operative work – to process our reactors and catalysts after we concluded a demonstration in Oklahoma, where we ran a commercial scale reactor for 5,000 hours. There’s a lot of learning, improvement and optimisation we can extract from that operation in Oklahoma, which is very valuable going forward.”
The company, a fusion of a spin-out of Oxford University research and development and an Ohio-based company, bringing together complementary technologies, has a three year option to develop at Stallingborough, with a plant in Mississippi also being brought forward. The 海角视频 plant is focused on waste streams once recycling options are exhausted, while in the US wood pellets from forestry waste - similar to those now used by Drax - will feed the process.
The South Humber Bank proved attractive because of access to skills, with a heritage in petro-chemicals and refining dating back more than 50 years.
What is now being realised has been 21 years in evolution. A 70 per cent greenhouse gas reduction and 90 per cent reduction in particulate matter emissions compared with conventional jet fuel is envisaged, contributing to both carbon emission reductions and air quality improvements around major airports.
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Mr Wareborn, who prior to joining Natixis had served as BP’s global commodity head for crude oil, said: “I am very confident, I am very excited and energised by the support hat has been demonstrated by current and new investors as well as our strategic partners Shell and BA to trust us with this significant increase of our capital resources here at this point.
“I feel we have a rare solution to one of the critical problems of our age to decarbonise aviation and heavy goods transport. We are all are aware that some transportation, light transportation, can be electrified and we can reduce emissions that way, but aviation and heavy transport cannot be run on batteries at any meaningful scale, so we need to find carbon free or fossil free fuels for those kind of activities.”
More than 100 jobs are forecast for the plant, which could be subsequently expanded. Roles would range from trade-trained technicians to PhD graduates.
Velocys has been working with BA for five years, with Shell coming on board to offer further technical advice.
“We have a fantastic team internally at Velocys and great partners working with us to achieve these goals and the two projects have an interplay and support each other tremendously between Mississippi and Immingham. It is the same technology but different feedstock and work to perfect these two projects has benefitted both projects in symbiotic and collaborative way between the different teams. Also, quite a lot of the teams have worked on both projects allows us to transfer a lot of experience and learning between the US and the 海角视频 and in return.
“It is good for the customers, good for investors and good for our clients.”