Carbon-neutral fuel launched at COP24

NextFuel, a new carbon-neutral fuel that is made from elephant grass has been unveiled at the United Nation's COP24 climate summit in Poland. The fuel can be burnt at industrial facilities such as cement plants to replace fossil fuels and requires no infrastructure upgrades.

Manufactured by Sweden-based NextFuel, the product of the same name is made by drying elephant grass and processing it in a sealed rotary drum where oxygen is removed before the material is densified and pressed in briquettes before being cooled.

NextFuel estimates that a cement plant currently operating on coal-fired power and heat could make CO₂ savings of 105 per cent if it switched to NextFuel, making it carbon-negative.

"Elephant grass needs a lot of CO₂ to grow, and also stores some of this in its roots below ground," said Stefano Romano, NextFuel's CEO. "In that way, it captures so much carbon from the atmosphere that it can make our entire process carbon-negative in a matter of months."

NextFuel is currently produced at an Austrian factory, with the company having secured EU funding to scale up production last year and Austrian engineering firm Andritz. It is set to be supplied to power the first two large-scale projects by the end of 2019, namely a cement plant in east Africa and a manufacturing facility in South America.