Listen in as Wastefront CEO Vianney Vales explains how the company aims to increase the supply of sustainable aviation fuel—or SAF—by recycling tires.
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Transcript:
Jeremy Kariuki: Hello, and welcome to the BCA Podcast by Aviation Week. I'm your host, Jeremy Kariuki, Associate Editor for Business Aviation. This week I'm joined by Vianney Vales, CEO of Wastefront. His company recently began construction of a plant in Northern England that will convert used automotive tires into usable, sustainable aviation fuel. As always, if you'd like to support the show, please consider subscribing, following, or rating us wherever you listen. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to the show, Vianney. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Vianney Vales: Thank you, Jeremy, for having me.
Jeremy Kariuki: As our listeners may not know, you are the CEO of Wastefront. And Wastefront recently just announced that you're building a plant in Northern England in the Port of Sunderland to convert tire waste into sustainable aviation fuel or SAF. So first of all, how are you planning on doing that? How does that work?
Vianney Vales: So, in terms of the process itself to transform a waste tire into SAF, there are two main steps. The first one is to take the waste tires and transform it into oil, pyrolysis oil, and carbon black. You take the waste tires, you heat the waste tires at a very high temperature in the absence of oxygen. The elements of the tires are decomposed into a gas that will then be condensed into a liquid, and that's the pyrolysis oil. Some elements of the tires called carbon black remain as carbon black and are extracted from the reactors as recovered carbon black. So you have these two products that you then need to refine and sell as a final product.
The oil will then need to be transformed further into SAF. SAF is a very sophisticated product. The Pyrolysis oil is not a very sophisticated product, so you need a lot of extra steps to transform this oil into SAF, and that's the second type of process that we use. The carbon black part needs a little bit of refining, but not as much as the oil and can be sold as recovered carbon black to tires manufacturers. That's basically how the whole system works.
Jeremy Kariuki: So how expensive is this method of SAF production as compared to normal methods?
Vianney Vales: Yeah, it's extremely competitive. It aligns competitiveness with simplicity if you compare to other processes. Basically, right now SAF is produced 98% in the world from a process called HEFA, hydro-treating of ester and fatty acids. That's what HEFA means, and basically about hydrogenating vegetable oils. That's a process that is mature, is reasonably cheap in terms of CapEx and OpEx, capital cost and operation cost, but you need to find a feedstock and that's the problem. Feedstock is limited in volume. It's currently mainly used cooking oil as a feedstock, and there's not much more used cooking oil that we can use to produce SAF than today. So there's a big limitation in volume for that route, which is currently the main one and is a reasonably cost-effective route.
The other routes are much less mature and they're very expensive. So, transforming a biomass, like a wood biomass into SAF, would require a lot of different steps. And the CapEx is extremely expensive and the maturity of the technology is not there.
So we're talking in terms of numbers about HEFA cost of production being around $1,500 per ton, and cost of alternative solutions being currently at $4,000 per ton, targeting maybe $2,500 per ton when they are mature.
Our solution will produce a SAF with a cost of production of less than $1,000 per ton, just to give you an order of magnitude. And why is that? It's because the CapEx and OpEx are actually quite low, similar to the HEFA solution, but the feedstock is a true waste, this pyrolysis oil from waste is a true waste and can be produced at a very low cost, contrary to the vegetable oil that serves as the feedstock of the HEFA. So we are basically, Jeremy, combining the advantages of all solutions, very cheap feedstock and cheap CapEx and OpEx, and that's how we manage to have a lower cost of production.
Jeremy Kariuki: According to a report by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, there's an estimated one billion end-of-life tires that are generated globally each year, so there's a big incentive to reduce that number of end of life tires or ELTs. So, how will Wastefront affect the total amount of ELTs? And how will Wastefront affect the availability and the supply of SAF itself?
Vianney Vales: So yeah, in both cases we are going to be small compared to the markets you mentioned, although we will be world leaders in terms of transforming those tires into SAF. To take the example of the UK where we will build our first plant, the UK generates around 50 million end-of-life tires per year, and a large commercial plant from Wastefront will use eight million end-of-life tires per year. We're starting right now with one-fourth of this size in the northeast of the UK, but a normal commercial plant will be around eight million.
So you see, even in the UK, one large plant is only 18% of the amount that's generated of end-of-life tires, and they're currently being exported mainly for incineration. And the same holds true for most Western countries where most of the end-of-life tires are incinerated at best as their final destination.
So, if you're talking about one billion tires, and probably there is more than that even, because a lot of tires are actually unaccounted for, including in the US, so that leaves room for a lot of plants of eight million tires. That would be already 120 plants. And our business plan in the next five years is to have five or six plants in operation.
Jeremy Kariuki: So, when choosing those locations for future plants, are you looking at where the tires are being discarded as those high priority places to avoid the transportation of those tires?
Vianney Vales: Yes, that's the main criteria. You really want to solve that pollution problem at the location where it is generated. So, instead of exporting your problems to third-party countries, you treat with a problem inland. And then you can offer to the tire manufacturers, who are generating indirectly those end-of-life tires in the country, a solution because you tell them, "By the way, good news, your tires have now been recycled into new tires, or sold as SAF." So in both case, they've contributed to a better environment instead of being exported for incineration elsewhere.
Jeremy Kariuki: When it comes to the plant itself, is it being built with sustainable materials, methods, or certain features, like solar energy, or any renewable sources in its construction?
Vianney Vales: So more generally than that, what we aim is to have a full lifecycle assessment that includes everything, includes the construction, includes transportation of material, includes the operation of the plant, everything included. We want to have a demonstrated reduction in CO2 of beyond 80% of what would be the alternative to produce jet fuel, for example. So, currently the latest life cycle assessment of our plant was at 83% reduction of CO2, and it includes aspects such as the one you mentioned.
Jeremy Kariuki: And outside of the environmental impact, what kind of economic impact do you anticipate the plant having on the Sunderland community?
Vianney Vales: So, Sunderland is a traditionally industrial city. It has suffered in the last decades from a lack of economic support, or economic drive if you want, compared to their previous glory in the 19th century as one of the leading shipyard cities in the world. And hence, there is a great amount of competences there that is not fully utilized in terms of capabilities to engineer those plants, build those plants, operate those plants. So we are building all these to the city of Sunderland.
The total investment for the full plant, this first phase, and then the second phase for a full commercial plant will be around a £100 million. So, most of the money stays locally for the construction, and then we'll have around a hundred operators, highly-skilled operators recruited also locally. So it's a huge event for the city of Sunderland, and we have had an incredible support from the city council, the port where the plant will be located. So yeah, it's significant impact on the community.
Jeremy Kariuki: And to shift focus to you as the leader of Wastefront. I would love to know more about your work experience leading up to this point. I know you have a lot of experience working with or for big oil companies. How has that experience informed your decision making and your approach to these type of sustainable efforts?
Vianney Vales: Yeah, you are right. I started my career as in the oil and gas business as a refinery manager. I also led shipping companies, trading companies, and I think all this gave me a good insight of what is possible, technically, to do with any type of feedstock beyond just crude oil. When you talk about SAF, SAF is really a super sophisticated product. It looks like jet, normal jet, except it's built from a different type of feedstock. So, all the knowledge that you accumulate as an oil refiner is extremely useful when you need now to produce the same type of products from different feedstock.
It also helped me when I joined the energy transition world, which was not called the energy transition at that time in 2007, it also helped me manage projects in a rigorous manner, because that's what oil and gas companies do. So, there were a lot of good things that I could take from the oil and gas business and allocate to the energy transition field.
Really the main difference is the environmental impact. So if you apply the rest, but with the prism of always having a positive environmental impact, a lot of things that you are using in the oil and gas business can actually be used in the energy transition. And you see now actually a trend, which I think is very fortunate, of integration of these two worlds where the oil and gas refineries and players are recognizing that they need to integrate these green solutions into their own systems in order to be more environmentally friendly. And at the same time, the green energy companies such as ours recognize that a lot of infrastructures in the oil and gas business can be used for our solutions.
So in our case, for example, the oil that we produce from this pyrolysis of the tire can initially be co-processed in an oil refinery. So we have partnership with refineries where they can co-process this pyrolysis oil into SAF in their infrastructure. And that accelerates the speed and the entry to market, and also makes the whole process simpler. So, this new, better integration of the energy transition in the traditional oil and gas world, for me is a very good sign. And I think my experience in the oil and gas business also helps tremendously accelerate that process in the case of Wastefront.
Jeremy Kariuki: Absolutely. Well, Vianney, that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with me.
Vianney Vales: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Jeremy.
Jeremy Kariuki: Thanks for listening to the BCA podcast by Aviation Week Network. This week's episode was produced by Jeremy Kariuki and Cory Hitt. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to or follow us on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to support us, please leave a rating wherever you listen. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.
