Virgin Atlantic announced that their planes will soon be able to fly from London to Hong Kong on fuel that produces half the carbon of regular jet fuel – which is sort of huge news, given that flying is one of our most carbon-intensive activities, enough to offset any good otherwise done by unplugging unused appliances or whatever.

Virgin is partnering with some New Zealand-based company called LanzaTech, which will allow it to harvest steel manufacturers’ wasted gas, which ought to provide feedstock for Virgin’s fuel.

The wasted gas is treated into ethanol, and that by Swedish Biofuel into jet fuel,  by a process that uses engineered microbes in each step, patented by LanzaTech and Swedish Biofuel respectively.

According to Sir Richard Branson, fifty six billion gallons of jet fuel could come from the waste gas from the steel industry each .

It should be noted here that the carbon still enters the atmosphere in the end – it’s just that we’re doing more things with a quantity of carbon production than would otherwise be the case.

So you know, yay for doing-reasonably-less-damage-to-everything.

[Source: Good]