The Green Fuels, Green Skies competition, was launched today by the Department for Transport (DfT) and delivery partners E4tech and Ricardo Energy & Environment. The competition will provide up to £15 million in grant funding to UK Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) projects during the 2021/22 financial year, as part of a drive to develop a SAF industry in the UK.

It will support the early-stage development of UK SAF plants, referred to as the “Front End Engineering Design (FEED)”, “Pre-FEED” and “Feasibility Study” stages of a project’s development life cycle. The competition will preferentially support activities related to the development of First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) commercial SAF plants, but will also be open to demonstration scale SAF projects, and will allocate up to £2m in funding for projects at the feasibility stage of development across these scales.

As delivery partners, E4tech and Ricardo Energy & Environment are responsible for designing the competition and running the assessment process. E4tech’s role is to advise DfT on aspects relating to SAF production technologies, feedstocks and GHG calculation methodologies, and to shape the competition eligibility and assessment criteria.

This competition follows on from a study by E4tech and Ricardo Energy & Environment to assess the overall feasibility of a grant funded competition and the types of funding mechanisms which could help support FOAK commercial SAF plant deployment in the UK.

Prior to this work, E4tech and Ricardo Energy & Environment have jointly successfully designed and delivered previous grant funded competitions to catalyse the deployment of advanced biofuels in the UK – the Advanced Biofuels Demonstration Competition (ABDC) and the Future Fuels for Freight and Flight (F4C) Competition.