Spanish energy giant turns trash into jet fuel in green bet

In a narrow valley with steep sides near the ancient city of Cartagena in Spain, a team of 150 engineers has just finished building a plant that could be a game changer for Spanish energy company Repsol and a bellwether for the transport industry.

Mr Emilio Mayoral, who manages the unit, said his colleagues were in the early days of brewing fuels for trucks and airplanes from what was formerly garbage. “It's quite flexible," he said. "We are currently using used cooking oil, but we can use other waste."

Repsol says these alternative fuels will cut emissions by up to 90 per cent compared with the petroleum-based products they will replace. The new fuels emit some carbon dioxide (CO2) when used, but they are produced from plants and other organisms that absorbed CO2 during their lifetimes, which is factored into the emissions calculation.

As an added benefit, these new biofuel products perform as well as their fossil fuel counterparts, even in cold northern European weather that creates problems for some fuels, Mr Mayoral said.

Madrid-based Repsol is one of Europe's largest energy companies, with 26,000 employees and more than 4,500 service stations as well as investments in renewable energy such as wind and solar power. Repsol reported income of €1.6 billion (S$2.3 billion) for the first half of 2024.

Energy companies like Repsolare betting that advanced biofuels like the ones being made at the Cartagena plant will play an important role in transportation well into the future. They figure that airplanes and heavy trucks as well as a significant portion of the passenger car fleet will continue to be powered by liquid fuels like diesel and jet fuel, despite growth in the market for electric vehicles.

Tightening regulations on emissions, they calculate, will force greater use of fuels that emit less CO2. Both energy companies and their customers consider biofuels

which can make use of large Energy companies like Repsol parts of existing infrastructure like petrol station pumps and storage tanks to be a practical and relatively inexpensive solution for navigating this technological and regulatory gauntlet.