SAF in Asia: cooking oil as a base material

To make aviation more sustainable in the next decades, airlines will need to focus on using more Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). As demand by airlines is increasing rapidly, the SAF industry is finding new production methods and materials. In China, large-scale production of SAF derived from used cooking oil will be utilized on flights soon.

This month, China Petrochemical Corp has produced a first large batch of cooking oil-based SAF and supplied it to Airbus' Tianjin plant. This first batch has recently obtained an airworthiness certificate in China, said China Petrochemical Corp (Sinopec), the world's largest refiner. China Daily reports that the cooking oil-SAF production facility has the capacity to produce 100,000 metric tons of aviation biofuel from secondhand cooking oil each year.

Sinopec has a history in the development of biojet fuel. In 2011, Sinopec, together with China National Petroleum Corp, finished four flight test trials using biojet fuel. In 2017 Sinopec supported China’s first cross-oceanic flight powered by green aviation fuel in 2017. Powered by this fuel, a flight from Beijing to Chicago carried 186 passengers and 15 crew members over a distance of 11,297 kilometers. The Boeing 787 aircraft flew with biofuel produced from used cooking oil by Sinopec. The biofuel is a mix of 15 percent cooking oil and 85 percent conventional aviation fuel.