Company in England experiments with human waste to produce a 'net zero' aviation fuel

A company in Gloucestershire, England, has devised a way to produce jet fuel from human sewage in an effort to make net-zero emissions for air travel.

Firefly Green Fuels, the BBC reports, had been looking for ways to make green jet fuel, with a number of feedstocks, including waste oils, waste food and agricultural scraps.

Finally, they began experimenting with human waste.

"We wanted to find a really low-value feedstock that was highly abundant. And of course poo is abundant,” James Hygate, Firefly Green Fuels CEO, told the BBC.

Hygate teamed up with a chemist from Imperial College in London and developed a “bio crude,” as they call it, which looks and behaves chemically like oil.

According to Hygate’s calculations, each human produces enough sewage per year to produce 4 to 5 liters of bio jet fuel.

A round-trip flight from London to New York, the BBC notes, would need the annual sewage of 20,000 people. The total sewage supply of the United Kingdom would meet 5% of the country’s total aviation fuel demand.