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British Airways owner IAG has joined the field of bidders for parts or all of insolvent German airline Air Berlin, two people familiar with the matter said Monday. Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) and several other parties had put in bids for parts of Air Berlin by the deadline of Friday set by the insolvency administrator. Air Berlin is Germany’s second-biggest airline after Lufthansa. It employs more than 8,000 people. Most potential investors appear interested primarily in the airline’s roughly 140 aircraft and its airport landing and take-off slots rather than in taking over the business. It could not immediately be learned what parts of Air Berlin IAG has bid for.<br/>

BA has partnered with renewable fuels company Velocys, after an earlier waste-to-fuel initiative—named GreenSky—with Washington-based Solena Fuels fell through. This latest venture uses fuel derived from waste biomass, similar to the GreenSky project that BA signed up to with Solena in 2010. Under that earlier project, BA was planning to power its London City flights using biofuels from a new facility in east London, which was scheduled to start production in 2017. However, the Solena project never materialized because of mixed government support, cautious investor appetite and low crude oil prices. In 2015, at the Airport Operators Association (AOA) annual conference, IAG CEO Willie Walsh said he was talking to a number of other sustainable fuel suppliers after Solena struggled to make progress. “It has been frustrating for various reasons, mainly external, but I am still optimistic that we will see sustainable biofuel,” he said at the time. Commenting on the new Velocys partnership, a BA spokesman said this venture is more likely to succeed because Velocys is already producing waste-based biofuels in the US.<br/>