China’s leading oil producer Sinopec announced the country’s first successful trial production of bio-aviation kerosene on Tuesday, marking China’s solid step towards large-scale commercial production of aviation biofuel.
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The first trial production, conducted by Sinopec Zhenhai Refining and Chemical Company, generated around 606 tonnes of China’s bio-aviation kerosene, part of which will be supplied to airline companies. Bio-aviation kerosene is produced from renewable resources such as waste cooking oil and animal and plant fat. Compared with traditional petroleum-based aviation fuel, the new biofuel can reduce CO2 emissions by over 50 percent or more throughout an airplane’s service cycle.In 2009, Sinopec started to conduct research on bio-aviation kerosene. It obtained China’s first bio-aviation kerosene airworthiness certificate in 2014, making it the first country in Asia and the fourth country in the world to have self-developed bio-aviation kerosene technology. In August 2020, China built its first large-scale industrial plant for producing bio-aviation kerosene with a designed annual capacity of processing around 100,000 tonnes.
Huang Aibin, director of the Sinopec Zhenhai Refining and Chemical Company, told China Media Group (CMG) that “the amount of waste cooking oil recycled in a city with a 10 million population is about 10,000 tonnes per month. If runs at full capacity, this plant can almost digest all the recycled gutter oil of a city this size annually.”Huang also mentioned the biggest difficulty is handling gutter oil as it contains a large number of fatty acid compounds, sulfur, chlorine, metal elements and other impurities, which are extremely difficult to remove. Huang’s team independently developed a special catalyst to optimize the processes of mixing, catalysis and heating. According to data, if China replaces its current aviation kerosene of around 30 million tonnes aviation kerosene with biofuel, the country can reduce about 55 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually, which is equivalent to dropping driving over 30 million family economic cars for a whole year
Source: This news is originally published by cgtn