From South Yorkshire, we are turning the biogenic waste into certified sustainable aviation fuel, using technology that already works.
The problem
Aviation is one of the few sectors with no straightforward route to decarbonisation. Batteries and hydrogen do not answer long haul flight, so the fuel itself has to change. The United Kingdom has a mandate that rises every year, and very little domestic production to meet it.
Almost all of the sustainable aviation fuel produced today is made from waste fats and oils. That feedstock is finite, it is in global competition, and it will not scale to the volumes the mandate assumes.
We work on the other route. Britain buries or burns millions of tonnes of biogenic material every year. It is abundant, it is already collected, and it costs nothing to acquire. Turning it into jet fuel is the answer that scales.
Sustainable aviation fuel is a direct replacement for conventional kerosene, made from renewable or waste derived material rather than from crude oil. It is certified to the same international specifications, it is blended into the same supply chains, and it burns in today's engines without modification to the aircraft. No new fleet, no new airports, no waiting.
Luna Fuel will produce Fischer Tropsch synthetic paraffinic kerosene, a class approved under ASTM D7566 Annex A5. That is an established pathway. What a new facility must demonstrate is production quality and batch release, not the qualification of a new class of fuel.
Almost all sustainable aviation fuel available today is made from used cooking oil, tallow and similar waste fats and oils. That route works, and it is running into a wall. The global supply of those materials is finite, it is already contested, and it cannot expand to meet a mandate that grows every year. A market with rising obligations and a fixed feedstock pool is a market with a price problem.
The alternative is to use material that is genuinely abundant. The biogenic fraction of household and commercial waste, paper, card, wood, textiles and food residues, is collected in millions of tonnes a year in this country, and today it is burned or buried. It does not compete with food production and it does not compete with the fats and oils pool.
It is also wet, inconsistent and contaminated, which is why most developers avoid it. That is an engineering problem, and engineering problems have answers.
The sustainable aviation fuel mandate places a rising obligation on fuel suppliers, with a specific sub obligation for fuels that are not made from fats and oils. Domestic production capable of meeting that sub obligation is currently very limited, which means the obligation is likely to be met by imports or by penalty payments unless facilities are built here.
The revenue certainty mechanism is the government's answer to the financing problem that has held those facilities back. Luna Fuel is being developed to be ready for an allocation round.
Aviation carries around two per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions today, and that share rises as other sectors decarbonise faster. Unlike road transport, it has no electric alternative at scale. The energy density that makes jet fuel work is the same property that makes it so difficult to replace.
Proven technology | South Yorkshire
An integrated facility converting the biogenic waste into certified sustainable aviation fuel and a wholly biogenic carbon for industry.
Luna Fuel uses pyrolysis, gasification, catalytic reforming, Fischer Tropsch synthesis and hydrocracking. Every one of those steps has industrial precedent measured in decades, and in one case in centuries. The work is in the integration around a difficult feedstock, not in the invention of new chemistry. That is a deliberate choice, and it is why the project is buildable.
Luna Fuel produces certified sustainable aviation fuel under an approved international standard, and a wholly biogenic carbon that replaces the fossil carbon British steelmaking uses as a chemical reducing agent rather than as a fuel. It also concentrates a stream of biogenic carbon dioxide, ready for permanent storage when a route is available.
Before the commercial plant is designed and frozen, we will run the entire process in series, on the real waste, in a pilot train on the same site. Findings land in a drawing rather than in a constructed asset. Every output figure we publish comes from a mass and carbon balance we will share in full with anyone who asks.
Luna Fuel sits on a secured plot at Gateway East near Doncaster and Sheffield Airport. Locating there is a deliberate engineering decision rather than a convenience. The location allows us to mitigate risks related to transport and logistics allowing the facility to serve three regional Airports from one location.
How it works
Delivered material is screened, shredded and sorted. Metals are recovered and sold. An optical sorter removes plastics, and an air classifier removes grit and glass. This stage is where the quality of everything downstream is decided.
The material is dried and continuously analysed on the belt for carbon, ash and moisture. Anything outside specification is diverted before it reaches the reactor. The reactor sees a controlled feed, and the variability of a waste reception hall is absorbed upstream.
The prepared material is heated without air in sealed rotating vessels, breaking it down into a synthesis gas, a condensable fraction and a solid carbon char. Heat passes through the vessel wall, so no combustion gases ever touch the material.
The gas is filtered hot, reformed over a catalyst to convert tars and methane into more synthesis gas, and then cleaned to an extremely fine standard. The specification here is set by what the synthesis catalyst can tolerate, which is measured in parts per billion.
Cleaned gas is combined with green hydrogen from an on site electrolyser and converted into liquid hydrocarbons over a cobalt catalyst, then cracked and reshaped into the jet fuel range. The oxygen produced alongside that hydrogen is used elsewhere in the process, which removes the need for a separate air separation plant.
Certified aviation fuel, a paraffinic naphtha, and a biogenic carbon for industry.
Steelmaking uses carbon as a chemical reducing agent, stripping oxygen from iron ore. That is not something electricity can replace, which is why the sector remains dependent on fossil carbon even as it electrifies elsewhere.
Part of the carbon in the waste leaves Luna Fuel as a solid, engineered material designed for that duty and made entirely from biogenic sources, including a binder produced on site from the process itself. Using a coal derived binder would defeat the point, so we do not.
We are developing this product for a portfolio of industrial applications rather than for a single destination, which reflects the transition underway in steelmaking.
Before the commercial plant is designed and frozen, we will build and run a fully independent pilot train on the same site, operating the entire process in series on the actual waste. It has no shared equipment with the commercial plant and it will be retained permanently as a development and feedstock qualification platform.
We aim to have the plant operational by 2031.
What we do
Contingent Strategies develops industrial decarbonisation assets and takes them through to construction. We focus on sustainable aviation fuel, and on projects where the barrier is deliverability rather than technology.
Very few industrial decarbonisation projects in Britain fail because the chemistry does not work. They fail because a consent does not arrive, because an offtaker will not sign without a financed plant while a lender will not fund without a signed offtake, because a contract is written in the wrong unit, or because a technical claim collapses under scrutiny and takes the sponsor's credibility with it.
Capital is not the constraint either. Some of the best funded projects of recent years have not been built.
Members of this team have taken industrial carbon capture projects through to financial close in 2025, among a small minority of the projects in that programme to reach that point.
Three people hold the transaction, each owning an outcome rather than a process, supported by counsel, financial modelling and technical resource under defined delegation.
This removes the single point of failure common to comparable transactions, where one person carries the deal, the analysis and the coordination and everything queues behind them. It also means decisions can be taken where no precedent exists, which is precisely the failure mode that places projects onto standby lists.
Every output figure for Luna Fuel comes from conservation of mass and carbon, closed on 100 kilogrammes of feed, from stated reactor conditions and stated conversions. We do not benchmark against published cost and yield studies. Those ranges are very wide, they use inconsistent boundaries, and a significant share of the underlying work has been funded by interests whose position depends on the answer. Leaning on that body of work means inheriting every argument about it. Deriving from first principles means the only thing anyone can dispute is a specific number, and that is a conversation we welcome.
Some parameters remain assumptions until the pilot campaign measures them, and the tolerance that places on our figures is stated openly in our technical documents. A developer who publishes only certainty is asking to be discounted.
Findings should land in a drawing.
Feedstock is bought on delivered biogenic carbon, not on wet tonnage. Offtake volumes are quoted against the plant configuration that produces them, not as a single flattering headline.
A development company, a construction company and an operating company make different demands on capability, governance and cash. Building one organisation and hoping it survives all three transitions is a common and avoidable failure.
Contingent Strategies is a development team. We take industrial decarbonisation assets from concept through to the point where they are financed and built.
Sustainability
We are a business, and we intend Luna Fuel to make money. We are also clear about why the company exists.
Climate change is the defining engineering problem of this century, and the sectors that are hardest to decarbonise are the ones where the returns are least obvious and the work is least glamorous. Aviation is one. Steelmaking is another. Both are being left until last, and both need people willing to spend years on consent, contract and diligence rather than on announcements.
That is the work we have chosen.
It diverts waste. 712,000 tonnes a year of biogenic material that would otherwise be burned or buried becomes fuel and industrial carbon.
It displaces fossil kerosene. With a certified fuel that works in today's aircraft, in today's supply chain, with no modification and no waiting.
It attacks a sector electricity cannot reach. Steelmaking needs carbon as a chemical reducing agent, not as a fuel. Our second product is a wholly biogenic answer to that.
It is built to go further. The facility concentrates a fully biogenic carbon dioxide stream and is designed to hand it over for permanent storage. Storing biogenic carbon removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere rather than merely avoiding new emissions.
We do not publish a lifecycle emissions percentage until the certified pathway calculation supports it. We do not describe the plant as carbon negative until a storage route exists and is contracted. And we do not count dilute combustion gases in our capture ready figure.
We would rather be believed than impressive.
Luna Fuel is being designed to ASTM D7566 Annex A5 for the aviation fuel, EN 15940 for the renewable distillate, the relevant ISO standards for the metallurgical product, and to IEC 61511 for functional safety. Sustainability certification will be under an approved RTFO pathway with full chain of custody from the point of waste reception.
Get in touch
Luna Fuel
Gateway East, near Doncaster and Sheffield Airport, South Yorkshire.