On June 28th, China’s first bio-jet fuel industrial plant produced bio-jet fuel for the first time at Sinopec Zhenhai Refinery, which means that my country’s bio-jet fuel can be produced on a large scale and move towards large-scale production and commercial application. A solid step. Compared with traditional petroleum-based aviation kerosene, bio-jet fuel can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 50% in the entire life cycle. The annual designed processing capacity of this device is 100,000 tons, which can basically digest the waste collected from a city of ten million people in one year. Oil can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 80,000 tons per year, which is equivalent to stopping nearly 50,000 economical cars for one year.
This bio-jet fuel industrial plant adopts the production technology developed by Sinopec Petrochemical Research Institute. Using used cooking oil, edible oil, that is, waste oil as raw material to produce bio-jet fuel, the biggest difficulty is that waste oil contains a lot of fatty acid compounds, and its oxygen content is as high as 11%, while the traditional raw material-petroleum contains Oxygen is 0.1% lower, a difference of more than 100 times. Oxygen molecules directly affect the activity and stability of catalysts in refinery units. In addition, waste oil also contains various impurities such as sulfur, chlorine, and metal elements, which must be removed one by one. To this end, Sinopec has independently developed special catalysts and processes, which have been demonstrated and verified by industrial-scale units. In May this year, Zhenhai Refining and Chemical Company passed the certification of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) for its bio-jet fuel products from the Hydrogenation of Fats and Oils (HEFA) route. This certification is the first global sustainability certification for bio-jet fuel products in my country, indicating that the raw materials, production processes and products of Zhenhai Refinery’s bio-jet fuel plant are all good
complies with the basic principles and standards for sustainable development of RSB biofuels.
The raw materials for the first batch of bio-jet fuel came from two technology and environmental protection companies in Chengdu, Sichuan, and the waste oil from meals was pretreated and shipped to Ningbo. It is estimated that in a city with a population of 10 million, the actual recycling volume of waste oil after meals is about 10,000 tons per month, and more than 100,000 tons of waste oil is recycled annually. Taking into account the conversion rate of waste oil, if the device runs at full capacity, it can basically digest waste oil recovered from a city with a population of 10 million in one year.
In 2009, Sinopec started the research and development of bio-jet fuel. In 2014, it obtained my country’s first bio-jet fuel airworthiness certificate. It has successively conducted commercial flights from Shanghai to Beijing on domestic routes and transoceanic flights from Beijing to Chicago on international routes. my country has become the first in Asia and the fourth in the world. Countries with independent research and development of bio-jet fuel technology. Since then, under the overall deployment of Sinopec, Zhenhai Refinery began to prepare for large-scale industrial production. In August 2020, China’s first large-scale industrialization plant for bio-jet fuel was completed in Zhenhai Refinery.
In addition to bio-jet fuel, over the years, Sinopec, as a state-owned enterprise, has used practical actions to help the development of my country’s bio-economy. Sinopec Yizheng Chemical Fiber has formed the process technology and product formula of biodegradable materials with independent intellectual property rights. The company’s series of biodegradable materials have been used in large supermarket plastic bags, agricultural mulch and other fields. Through capital leveraging, Sinopec Capital has successively invested in Zhejiang Hisun Biomaterials Co., Ltd., Longze Technology and other companies, actively deployed the biomass chemical industry chain ecosystem, and promoted the application and market promotion of biotechnology.
