SAF has feedstock potential to replace jet: Correction

Corrects estimates of feedstocks availability in paragraph 3 and 4. Story was originally published on 22 January

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), or biojet, has the feedstock potential to fully meet global jet fuel demand by 2030, Finnish refiner Neste's head of aviation regulation Henrik Erametsa told the virtual Fuels of the Future conference.

Erametsa said the amount of potential feedstock would be sufficient to produce around 490mn t of SAF by that date, which compares with his estimate for global jet fuel demand at 410mn t by the end of this decade.

He said that cellulosic cover crops have the potential to account for the largest share of SAF feedstock, around 29pc, and he estimated that 1.1bn t would be available by 2030. Municipal solid waste feedstock availability will be 960mn t, agricultural residues 660mn t, forestry residues 580mn t and wood-processing waste 320mn t.

He said that waste and residue lipids will be the smallest pool of feedstocks, totalling around 40mn t. Within the waste and residue feedstocks pool, industrial wastes and residues including category-three tallow will account for around 29.2mn t, wastes listed in Annex IX part B of the recast Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) — used cooking oil (UCO) and tallow category one and two — will total 10.3mn t, and residues listed in Annex IC part A — palm oil mill effluent (Pome) and technical corn oil (TCO) — will amount to 2.7mn t.

But, he said that biojet production is unlikely to reach those levels unless mandates are put in place to drive demand and to encourage new investments for additional capacity in addition to projects already in the pipeline.

Neste estimates that total SAF production will increase to 4.8mn t/yr by 2025, with the hydro-processed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) SAF technology accounting for the largest share with 4.2mn t/yr followed by gasification and alcohol-to-jet with 300,000 t/yr each. It said that there is an additional 3.4mn t/yr potential for HEFA-SAF growth in the next four years, which would place total production above 8mn t/yr in 2025.

SAF technologies will mature and ramp up in three stages, Erametsa said. The HEFA technology is available at industrial scale, meaning that no significant fluctuations in HEFA-SAF prices are likely in the coming years. The second stage involves development of gasification and alcohol-to-jet processes, and the final stage will see the scaling-up of the Power-to-Liquids (PtL) technology that could account for around 50pc of global SAF production by 2050.

Neste produces 100,000 t/yr of SAF at its Porvoo refinery in Finland and plans to produce 1mn t/yr from 2022 at its under-construction Singapore refinery. It is targeting a further 450,000 t/yr of production from 2023 at a Rotterdam plant, where it is undertaking a feasibility study.

By Giulia Squadrin