MADRID: The Spanish oil and gas company Repsol will produce more than 2 billion kilos of sustainable biofuel per year within ten years. Biofuel will play a key role in the sectors for which the transition to electricity is difficult.
According to the energy company, this should include sustainable biofuel for heavy transport by road or air. Repsol aims to be carbon neutral by 2050 and will use biofuel production as the main strategy to achieve this goal.
No new infrastructure needed
Process Development Manager Miguel Ángel García Carreño from Repsol’s Techonogy Lab emphasises the chemical composition of biofuel is suitable for use in today’s combustion engine vehicles. As this is a concern for the majority of the total vehicle fleet, the existing infrastructure for fuel distribution and replenishment can be maintained. According to García Carreño, it is therefore a realistic and viable way to reduce CO2 emissions within the transport sector.
For their biofuel strategy, Repsol is building the first factory in Cartagena. It will produce 250million kilos of sustainable fuel annually from 2023. From 2025, production will increase to 1.3billion kilos of sustainable fuel. This will increase to more than 2 billion kilos of fuel per year from 2030 according to its latest newsletter.
Biofuel for aviation
In its Cartagena factory, Repsol is developing a technology to produce advanced biofuels from hydrogen and recycled raw materials. The fuels – biodiesel, biojet, bionaphtha and biopropane – can fuel current aircraft engines. The sustainable aviation fuel could save 900 thousand tons of CO2 emissions annually. That is as much CO2 as a forest the size of 180 thousand football fields can absorb per year.
Biojet will also be produced at the Murcia plant. The Puertollano plant produced the first 7 million kilos of this biofuel type last summer in Spain.
