eSAF – e-methanol to aviation Aalborg Airport

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 eSAF-AAL 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 it sability  to operate  flexible based on electricity from renewable sources, and in its simplicity, that altogether makes it very cost competitive.

The eSAF-AAL target is to produce the first eSAF at pre-commercial scale in Aalborg by the end of 2023 and prepare the technical basis to build a full-scale plant in Aalborg with a production capacity of 10.000 tons/year that will be in operation by the end of 2024 and supply the first domestic route in Denmark.