China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec Group) and TotalEnergies on March 26 inked an agreement on joint development of sustainable aviation fuel.
The research and development will be based on waste oil and will be carried out in Sinopec’s refinery plant. The annual output is expected to reach 230,000 metric tons.
Bio-aviation fuel is a kind of sustainable aviation kerosene produced with renewable resources as raw materials. Compared to traditional petroleum-based aviation kerosene, the carbon dioxide emissions throughout the lifecycle of the bio-aviation fuel can be reduced by more than a half.
As one of the leading sustainable aviation fuel producers in Europe, TotalEnergies regards development of sustainable aviation fuel as the core of its energy transformation strategy. In order to keep in line with the carbon reduction requirement in the aviation industry, the company set a goal to produce 1.5 million tons of sustainable aviation fuel annually by 2030.
Sinopec Group owns the sustainable bio-aviation fuel production technology with proprietary intellectual property rights and has made efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of the product and the production.
The company has made efforts to promote development of China’s bio-aviation fuel industry. The company independently developed the bio-aviation fuel production technology in 2009 and produced qualified bio-aviation fuel for the first time in December 2011. In April 2013, bio-aviation fuel produced by the company was used in a flight at the Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport for the first time.
Its bio-aviation fuel was put into domestic and overseas commercial use in 2015 and 2017, respectively, making China the first country in Asia and the fourth in the world to own independently-developed bio-aviation fuel technology.
In May 2022, China’s first bio-aviation fuel industrial facility with an annual capacity of 100,000 tons underwent test operation at Sinopec Zhenhai Refining & Chemical Company, and obtained Asia’s first RSB biomass sustainable aviation fuel certification. In September in the same year, the first batch of large-scale production of bio-aviation fuel in China obtained airworthiness certification.
