Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 1st of July. Yes, we're more than halfway through the year. Where has it gone? And what's happening in the future? That's the subject for today's podcast. I'm looking at sustainable aviation fuel,

which a lot of people think is the best way forward for limiting the damage caused by flying

and a possible new process that could actually see the amount of the stuff that's available to

airlines being much more

widely available and much cheaper. The basic idea of sustainable aviation fuel is that you are not

actually getting fossil fuels out of the ground. The great advantage of the engines that are being made now is that they can use this

in the same way as they would do traditional aviation fuel. There was a Virgin Atlantic flight from

London Heathrow to New York JFK last November which did this and that was using actually recycled cooking oil.

Trouble is there's not a lot of raw materials available that can go into this but today's guest

Chris Hancock who is the chief executive of Avioxx, believes that his company has hit upon processes that will increase the supply and cut the cost of the precious fluid that powers you and I around the world.

It's all to do with solid oxide fuel cells, as he's been telling me.

Sustainable aviation fuel is an incredibly exciting area of innovation. And what's brilliant about

aviarchs, and what I'm really excited about is the feedstock that we're using. So we turn household municipal waste, of which 28.8 million tonnes per year in the UK goes to incineration or landfill.

And using the novel aviocs system that we're developing, we can turn those molecules and rearrange those molecules

into sustainable aviation fuel, using a series of different reactors to achieve that.

There are various companies who are making sustainable aviation fuel at the moment in very limited quantity.

So Virgin Atlantic had massive achievement in November last year where they flew the first flight

from London to New York, 100% sustainable aviation fuel.

However, the feed stop that they were using was used cooking oil, which is very limited in supply.

So that's one example, one system and one way of making sustainable aviation fuel.

But using hydrocarbons that are already within the environment that we can reprocess,

allows us to make the fuel.

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