Lufthansa will buy green kerosene from northern German refinery

German airline Lufthansa will start sourcing synthetic fuel (so-called "kerosyn") for its planes from the Heide refinery in northern Germany, Carsten Rauterberg reports for NDR. The refinery will use excess wind power to synthesise the fuel by splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen and by adding CO2 to the hydrogen. In five years, the refinery, which is supplying Hamburg airport with 350,000 tonnes of conventional airplane fuel, wants to produce five percent of the fuel used in Hamburg synthetically, refinery head Jürgen Wollschläger told the author. German Lufthansa vice-president Thorsten Luft commented: “With the Heide refinery we have found a local and innovative supplier, and with short supply routes.”

With about 2.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, German domestic aviation was responsible for 0.26 percent of the country’s total CO₂ output in 2016. Many experts believe that aviation can only achieve a significant reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by using synthetic fuels, since the switch to battery-run planes on a large scale was “unrealistic”.