We are thrilled to be part of a breakthrough project pioneering sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which has just been awarded UK government funding for the second time.
The project — “Advancing Sustainable Aviation via Power-to-Liquid and Direct Air Capture” (ASAP-DAC) — is led by a consortium headed by alternative fuels developer Carbon Neutral Fuels, and includes io consulting as engineering partner and ourselves as Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology partner. It is one of 17 projects selected by the Department for Transport to share a pool of £63M in grant funding through the latest phase of its Advanced Fuel Fund.
With the UK government committed to becoming a global leader in SAF production, the fund aims to advance the most promising technological SAF pathways and scale the UK-based companies developing them. It follows a mandate which came into force last year stipulating that 10% of all aviation fuel in the UK come from SAF by 2030, and seeks to catalyse the homegrown supply ecosystem required to deliver it.
Funding the design of a commercial-scale SAF plant
This latest round of funding will support the completion of a front-end engineering design (FEED) for a SAF production facility in Workington, Cumbria using power-to-liquid and direct air capture technologies. Once operational, the facility will produce 25,000 litres of SAF per year, which would make it one of the first DAC-enabled SAF projects of its kind in the world.
As part of this work, the funding will deliver a FEED study design for a next-generation deployment of Mission Zero’s DAC technology capable of recovering 10,000 tonnes of atmospheric CO₂ each year — a 40x scale-up from our first operational DAC system deployed just two years ago for SAF production.
The higher cost certainty and engineering confidence this will deliver stands to de-risk our DAC technology for other industrial utilisation and removal markets — such as building materials, commodity CO₂, and mineralisation — which require large volumes of reliable and scalable fossil-free CO₂ this decade.
"We are thrilled to be further expanding the application of our DAC technology for SAF on home soil. This is an exciting milestone for the UK carbon-to-value ecosystem, supporting technologies essential for large-scale industrial utilisation and removal of CO₂."
— Nicholas Chadwick, CEO of Mission Zero Technologies
Scaling SAF means scaling sustainable CO₂
With around half of all grant-winning projects using sustainable CO₂ as a feedstock in their processes, this latest government funding sends a strong signal that scaling power-to-liquids SAF will require a huge supply of fossil-free CO₂.
At Mission Zero, we believe the answer lies in the CO₂ available abundantly in our atmosphere, which can be harnessed anywhere using DAC technology. Free from the volume limits and sourcing sustainability concerns of biomass-based supply, scaling DAC CO₂ offers a truly unconstrained solution for SAF developers to be able to reach a final investment decision for new projects.
That’s why we have been early enablers of this pathway — delivering the UK’s first operational commercial DAC system to the University of Sheffield’s Energy Innovation Centre in December 2023 to demonstrate and certify the end-to-end production of ultra-low-carbon jet fuel made from air.
