Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) are a necessity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. Today, the production of SAF is very limited compared with the global consumption, and at the same time, ambitious mandates for their use are discussed atnational as well as EU level.

In Denmark ambitions are to operate the first green domestic flights already by 2025 and by 2030 all domestic flights must use SAF. This creates an urgency for rapid deployment of SAF production capacity.

SkyNRG estimates that every year from 2027 until 2050, the production capacity must increase by 1.000.000 tons/year in Europe alone. One of the most sustainable and scalable routes to SAF is via green hydrogen and CO2 that is converted to a synthetic fuel either via methanol as an intermediate or by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

The objective of MeSAF is to develop and demonstrate a novel technology that converts raw-methanol, prior to distillation, to eSAF in a single step-using a groundbreaking catalyst from Vertimass, US. This technology will have clear advantages in its ability  to operate  flexible based on electricity from renewable sources, and in its simplicity, that altogether makes it very cost competitive.

The target is to produce the first MeSAF at pre-commercial scale in Aalborg and prepare the technical basis to build a full-scale plant equally in Aalborg with a production capacity of 10.000 tons/year to supply the first domestic route in Denmark.

The Danish consumption of jet fuel for domestic flights is around 25,000 tonnes annually. This can be provided by one facility in Denmark, which is linked to a 150-200 MW coastal wind farm and a solar farm with an energy capacity of around 200-300 MW. With this financing of a test facility, we are one step closer to realizing the prime minister’s goal to have domestic flights in Denmark run exclusively on sustainable fuels

Søren Knudsen Kær, PtX Technology Manager, European Energy

Press

https://ens.dk/presse/eudp-stoetter-26-nye-groenne-energiprojekter-med-195-mio-kr
https://renewablesnow.com/news/european-energy-to-build-saf-test-facility-in-denmark-788993/