Indian Oil Corp., the largest refiner in the country, is set to launch its first sustainable aviation fuel production facility by the end of the year. Production capacity will be 35,000 tons annually, with the feedstocks coming from hotel chains, restaurants, and other large-scale users of cooking oil.
The plant’s projected capacity will be enough to meet India’s requirements for blending 1% of sustainable aviation fuel with jet fuel beginning from 2027, the chairman of Indian Oil Corp., Arvinder Singh Sahney, told the media as quoted by The Indian Express. The main market for the product will be Europe, which has SAF blending mandates for airlines operating on its territory.
Sustainable aviation fuel, produced from waste materials such as cooking oil and biomass, is believed to be a necessary element of the energy transition due to the amount of emissions from the aviation industry, which amount to 2.5% of the global total emissions of carbon dioxide.
However, sustainable aviation fuels are expensive to produce, which has made their transformation into a mainstream blending component for jet fuel problematic. The high costs are attributable to the complex process required to turn waste fats and oils into biofuel, but also to a more challenging problem: the lack of sufficient amounts of waste fats and oils.
Reuters recently published a detailed look into the present state of SAF production globally and its immediate outlook. The picture painted by that article was not an optimistic one. A number of large air carriers made commitments to buy significant amounts of sustainable fuels from startup producers only to change their minds later, likely when they realised the bill they would be facing. As a result, SAF producers are shutting down, and the availability of these fuels is shrinking instead of growing ahead of blending mandates.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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