Cooking Oil-Powered Plane to Fly Tourists to Antarctica

A luxury-tour operator plans to run flights from Cape Town to Antarctica on an Airbus A340-600 that will use jet fuel partly supplied by Sasol and produced from renewable feedstocks, including used cooking oil. White Desert has previously sourced sustainable aviation fuel from Europe and will switch to locally produced SAF after Sasol’s Natref refinery secured international sustainability certification. Ticket prices for the Antarctic tours are reported to range from $16,500 to $120,000 depending on the itinerary.

Natref, Sasol’s refinery in Sasolburg, is South Africa’s only inland crude-oil refinery and can process roughly 108,500 barrels per day. Sasol’s SAF is made by processing renewable materials such as used cooking and vegetable oils together with conventional feedstock; the resulting product is blended with traditional jet fuel so it can be used in current aircraft and fueling systems without engine or infrastructure modifications.

The move aligns with growing but still limited industry use of SAF. The International Civil Aviation Organization says more than 360,000 commercial flights have used SAF at 46 airports, primarily in the United States and Europe, and major suppliers like World Energy and Neste already provide lower-emission fuels to carriers such as United, KLM and Delta. Regulations allow commercial flights to use blends of up to 50% SAF mixed with fossil-based jet fuel.

Despite its compatibility with existing aircraft, SAF makes up a small share of global jet fuel supply because production capacity is limited and costs remain higher than for conventional jet fuel. The environmental benefit of SAF stems from using renewable waste streams rather than extracting additional crude oil, but aircraft will still emit greenhouse gases when burning these fuels.

Longer-term industry targets envision much greater SAF use as part of a path to net-zero aviation by 2050. The European Union has set binding blending mandates that start with a minimum 2% SAF in 2025 and scale to 70% by 2050, including a requirement that 35% of that supply come from synthetic electro-fuels made by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.