Global Bioenergies co-developing low-cost SAF tech

French sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) technology developer Global Bioenergies announced signing of a term sheet with an industrialist to co-develop a process to produce SAF at a lower cost.

Global Bioenergies said that if successful, the technology will be ready to take up mandated and targeted SAF volumes from 2030 and beyond.

“Following our ASTM certification during the summer 2023, we have teamed up with a large industrialist who had identified a perfect match between their technology and Global Bioenergies’. The combination of both technologies would result in a process overcoming the two major barriers for SAF production: capex and opex costs,” said Marc Delcourt, co-founder and CEO of Global Bioenergies.

This process, which is currently under development, will rely on the combination of Global Bioenergies’ bio-isobutene process and the industrialist’s proprietary technology. The company is confident that this would lead to a decisive competitive advantage among the existing SAF technologies, aiming at relaying the current SAF production based on used cooking oil.

Commenting on need to co-develop a new technology, the company said that currently, only commercial technologies are the HEFA process and its co-processing variation, both based on used cooking oil and animal tallow oil.

The company said that these resources are soon to plateau, and the SAF community is now focused on identifying the best suited technology to take the relay.

“The combination of the two technologies will lead to a much simpler and straightforward process to produce SAF, designed for implementation in existing facilities. Such combination could lower feedstock, capex, and processing costs very substantially, and utilize existing biorefinery assets such as corn dry mills, after minor retrofitting, limiting main investment to the downstream stages of converting isobutene into SAF. CO2 savings would also be improved. We already obtained early proof of concept, and are now preparing for the next phase,” said Frédéric Ollivier, chief technology officer at Global Bioenergies.