Commercial aircraft engine lessor Willis Lease Finance Corp. plans to develop a power-to-liquid sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plant in northeast England.
The plant would be established close to Teesside International Airport in Darlington, where the company has an aircraft services business.
Feasibility studies for the SAF refinery were completed in late 2022 and the project is now in the front-end engineering design stage. Feedstocks for the power-to-liquids process would be CO2 from industrial waste gases and green hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis using renewable electricity.
U.S.-based Willis Lease Finance Corp. (WLFC) and its subsidiary Willis Sustainable Fuels (UK) are working with Teesside Airport on the project. An application for planning permission is expected within weeks, says the Tees Valley Combined Authority, with an approval decision expected in months.
WLFC is “the first aviation leasing company to spearhead a SAF initiative of this magnitude,” CEO Austin Willis says. Separately, the company is developing a £25 million ($32 million) maintenance facility at Teeside Airport, where its Jet Center already provides ground handling for private, business, cargo and military flights.
The WLFC-led project is one of several SAF plants planned for the Teesside region. In June, biodiesel producer Greenergy announced plans for two renewable fuel plants in the area, one producing SAF from waste oils and the other producing biofuels from end-of-life vehicle tires. The company has submitted a planning application with plans to begin construction in 2025 and start fuel production in 2027.
Under the £1.3 billion Lighthouse Green Fuels project, Dutch waste-to-fuel specialist N+P and Saudi power infrastructure company Alfanar, plan to build a plant on Teesside that will produce 165 million liters (43.6 million gal.) of SAF per year from non-recyclable household waste using the Fischer-Tropsch process. Production is planned to begin in 2028.
In December 2022, Nova Pangea Technologies selected a site on Teesside for its planned first commercial plant, Novaone, to produce bioethanol from agricultural and wood waste for conversion to SAF. Planned to be operational by 2025, the 102 million liters-per-year plant is being developed jointly with British Airways and alcohol-to-jet SAF specialist LanzaJet.
UK energy giant BP has several renewable energy projects under way in the region. These include H2Teesside, targeting 1.2 gigawatts of blue hydrogen production from natural gas by 2030, and HyGreen Teesside, with an initial target of 80 megawatts of green hydrogen production by 2025 expanding to 500 megawatts by 2030. BP is also planning a project on Teesside to capture and store CO2 under the North Sea.
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