Worldwide Flight Services switches ground-support equipment at Paris airport to 100% renewable diesel

Worldwide Flight Services, a member of the SATS Group, announced Oct. 21 that it will achieve an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions from its ground-support equipment at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport by replacing conventional fuel with 100 percent hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO100), also known as renewable diesel.

Starting this month, HVO100 will power WFS ground-support equipment such as tow trucks, self-propelled aircraft stairs, ground-power units, loaders, aircraft-pushback vehicles, baggage belt loaders, cargo transporters and air-start units.

These are used to handle over 2,850 flights a year at the airport.

WFS will consume over 400,000 liters (105,669 gallons) of HVO100 from supplier Campus to support 82 percent of its yearly ground-support equipment energy consumption.

“This latest biofuel deployment by WFS in the EMEAA region will make another important contribution to meeting SATS’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) group priorities,” said Laurent Bernard, WFS’s country manager for France.

“The use of biofuel is a plug-and-play solution that enables us to responsibly source a sustainable fuel without the need to modify our ground-support equipment fleet,” Bernard added.

This latest initiative follows the start of HVO trials by WFS at London Heathrow in July in support of Heathrow’s goal for all airport vehicles to be zero-emission or using biofuels by 2030.

Pending a successful outcome of the initial three-month trial involving WFS’s airside-transport fleet, HVO biofuel will be phased in across the entire WFS fleet of 77 airside vehicles, which conduct approximately 130,000 truck movements a year at Heathrow for airline customers.