Used cooking oil is a waste product with a collection round, and Sasol has found it a job on an aeroplane. On 15 September, at the Africa Green Hydrogen Summit in Cape Town, it announced its first commercial sale of sustainable aviation fuel, made from used cooking oil and co-processed at its Natref refinery in Sasolburg.
That is an unusual announcement from a company whose business is coal. Sasol is the world's largest producer of fuel and chemicals made from it, and ranks among South Africa's biggest greenhouse-gas emitters.
The buyer is not an airline. White Desert runs luxury expeditions from Cape Town to Antarctica and has used low-carbon fuel since 2021, according to its website. A one-day flight, glacier abseil and ice-bar champagne toast included, costs $16,500. A seven-day itinerary runs to $120,000.
The refinery that was already standing
The mechanism matters more than the volume here. Sasol did not build anything. It aggregates the oil from users around South Africa and co-processes it at Natref, a working crude oil refinery, Danie Cronje of Sasol told Eyewitness News. What turns the output into something a customer will pay extra for is a certificate: Natref recently earned ISCC+ accreditation, and that is what lets the fuel be sold as the low-carbon kind.
“We do not decarbonise aviation by abandoning existing industrial assets, but by transforming them,” said Dr Sarushen Pillay, Sasol's executive vice president for business building, strategy and technology. South Africa has the infrastructure and the technical capability to take part in this market, he said, and this fuel is a bridge towards the e-fuels green hydrogen would eventually allow.
How much of it there is
Not a great deal, yet. Cronje, a senior vice president in the same division as Pillay, told EWN that Natref can currently make around one to two million litres a year. He put the emissions saving at about 75%, a figure that appears in his broadcast interview and not in Sasol's own release.
Where it goes from there depends on which interview you read. Cronje told EWN the refinery should be making 15 million litres by the end of 2027. He told News24 it could reach 100 million litres a year by 2030, doubling again once Secunda is certified. Those are not the same ramp, on either the number or the date.
Price is the other brake. The fuel can cost two to three times conventional jet fuel, Cronje told News24, and the global market accounted for about 0.6% of jet fuel demand last year on BloombergNEF figures the same outlet cited. Aviation makes up roughly 2% of world carbon dioxide emissions, on US Department of Energy numbers, so a season of expedition flights is not where that moves.
Cronje says supplying White Desert is seasonal work, and that Sasol has had interest from other customers and is finalising terms with them. For now the bigger production push is still at Secunda, the coal-to-fuel hub that makes Sasol what it is.
