S. Korea’s Incheon Airport announces SAF incentive scheme
South Korea’s Incheon Airport has announced KRW100m ($70,000) for international flights fuels with domestically-produced sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for a period of one year starting from January 1st, 2025 to December 31, 2025.
Eligibility criteria shared by the airport said that flights that use more than 1% of SAF will be incentivized.
The incentive will be paid in the form of differential reductio of lighting charge based on flight distance. For long-haul flight, airlines using more than 1% of SAF will be waived 100% of the lighting charge while for short-haul flights, 70% of the lighting charge will be waived.
The airport also shared the routes for short-haul flights including those departing for Chinese, Japanese, Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian routes and Oceania (Guam, Saipan) route, South West Asia (Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India) routes. Meanwhile, all other routes will be classified as long haul.
Airlines claiming the incentive will have to file an application with SAF fuelling documents including those that demonstrate SAF quality and supply such as SAF certificates e.g. ISCC CORSIA, ISCC EU etc.
Multiple developers are working on producing SAF in South Korea. Earlier this year, South Korean chaebol LG Chem and Italian energy major Enilive announced that they have signed an agreement with custom-engineering firm Desmet for the construction of biorefinery at LG Chem’s existing site integrated petrochemical complex in Daesan, South Korea.
The state-of-the-art facility will feature cutting-edge technology for producing sustainable aviation fuel. This plant will have an HVO pretreatment, with a plant capacity to enable a production up to 340,000 tons of SAF, bio-diesel and bio-naphtha annually from a variety of waste and used oils & fats feedstocks.