Enilive, easyJet sign 2 agreements for SAF supply in Italy
Enilive announced Dec. 3 a new agreement with European airline easyJet to supply a number of flights from Milan Malpensa Airport with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
The SAF purchased by easyJet, which has a purity of 20 percent and is blended with conventional jet fuel, enables the airline to meet its requirements for flights on its two new routes to Norway (Malpensa-Oslo and Malpensa-Tromsø) over the winter season.
Furthermore, the airline will benefit from airport operator SEA’s SAF Support Program 2024, which has provided a contribution of 800 euros (USD$842) a ton to carriers that use this fuel at Milan’s airports during the year, with a total value of 500,000 euros (USD$526,152).
Enilive and easyJet have also signed a letter of intent for a potential additional supply of about 30,000 metric tons of pure Enilive SAF between 2025 and 2030 at other Italian airports where the airline operates.
The agreement follows the airline’s late November announcement about its expansion in the Italian market and a series of recent commitments easyJet has made to help stimulate growth of the SAF market.
In early November, the airline and Airbus launched a new business-travel solution that will explore corporate partnerships to finance the use of SAF with the goal of minimizing their economic impact and, thus, making this solution more affordable.
In addition, at the end of October easyJet formally joined Project SkyPower, a CEO-led consortium aiming to accelerate the growth of the eSAF industry by helping unlock final-investment decisions for eSAF projects in Europe.
SAF is a key tool that is already available to support the decarbonization path of aviation, and it will play an increasingly relevant role in the future.
In its biorefineries in Italy, Enilive processes mainly waste feedstocks such as used cooking oil, animal fats and agribusiness residues to produce SAF, which contains 100 percent biogenic component and is suitable to be blended with conventional jet up to 50 percent.
From 2025, Enilive will reach a pure SAF production capacity of 400,000 tons per year, thanks to the imminent startup of the first plant in the Gela biorefinery, and thereafter the company will increase its SAF production to 1 million tons per year by 2026 with a further potential doubling by 2030.
“Today, SAF is the available solution to help decarbonize air transport,” said Enilive CEO Stefano Ballista. “In the future, following the implementation of the European Union’s ReFuelEU regulation, which calls for a gradual increase of pure SAF input to 70 percent by 2050, there will be an increasingly more significant demand by operators such as easyJet, which is credited with being ahead of its time as it has already begun to use our SAF. To meet the market needs, we are developing new biorefining projects in Italy and abroad.”
Raminder Shergill, easyJet’s director of tax and fuel strategy, added, “SAF is key to our decarbonization strategy and will play a vital role in helping the aviation sector achieve its net-zero ambitions. We are therefore delighted to be working with Enilive and with our key partner SEA to sign this agreement and hope it provides another positive signal to stimulate further growth of the SAF industry.”
