World Energy Secures Permits; Will Completely Convert Its Southern Calif. Refinery to Create North America’s Largest SAF Hub

by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) In a sweet SAF switcheroo, huge news arrived from California-based World Energy, a carbon-net-zero solutions provider, that it secured the critical permits required to completely convert and increase output by 700 percent at its Southern California renewable fuels production facility, the world’s first and North America’s only commercial-scale Sustainable Aviation Fuel production site. World Energy is teaming up with Air Products, the world’s largest hydrogen producer, and Honeywell, an innovator in SAF technology, to build the most technologically advanced production and distribution hub ever constructed – in a $2 billion project that will yield 340-million-gallons of annual capacity and collaboration to advance green hydrogen too.

In today’s Digest, an exclusive Digest inside look at how World Energy is converting its Southern California refinery to create North America’s largest SAF hub, the players, the reactions including from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Mayor and U.S. Congress, why it’s such a huge deal, what it all means, and more.

Air Products and World Energy will collaborate on innovations to transition to green hydrogen inputs, further reducing the carbon intensity of the fuels it produces.

The huge positive economic impact can’t be ignored either – The Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) Institute for Applied Economics (IAE) conducted a multiregional economic impact analysis and estimates that between 2019 and 2024, World Energy’s ongoing operations and conversion will contribute $19.2 billion to the U.S. economy and generate more than 18,000 jobs. Now we are talking!

World Energy’s SAF is a paraffinic product that is refined through a process called Hydrotreated Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA). This produces a SAF called HEFA-SPK. The HEFA process that World Energy uses refines renewable inputs, including inedible agricultural fats and waste oils into SAF through a process that uses hydrogen (hydrogenation).

“The Paramount facility will be online and in full production by 2025,” World Energy told The Digest over the weekend.

Another World Energy leader, Adam Klauber, Vice President, ESG and Sustainability, told The Digest, “This project is all about green-collar jobs – we’re going to create over 1,000 jobs with a focus on local hiring. By 2025, World Energy supply will replace over 10% of LAX’s fuel supply, and this will benefit local air quality, because we’ll be swapping the conventional fossil-fuel, that has high particulate matter, with fuel that has very low particulate matter, which is much better for breathing and the lungs of all the residents in the local community. So we’re going from 250 barrels of sustainable aviation fuel a day, all the way to 25,000 barrels of sustainable aviation fuel a day, this will make California home to the largest advanced biofuel producer for sustainable aviation fuel anywhere.”

The world’s first and North America’s only commercial-scale SAF facility was launched in Paramount, using Honeywell UOP’s Ecofining technology in 2013, with production commencing in 2016. World Energy and Honeywell have continued to collaborate and have strengthened this critical relationship with a technical development agreement to advance the next generation of carbon reduction technologies. This collaboration will further innovations integrating more efficient SAF production processes, new process pathways using new sustainable feedstocks, low-carbon hydrogen, and carbon capture technologies.

The bottom line is this is huge news for SAF and the aviation industry in seeing a big impact on aviation sustainability – perfect timing for Earth Day weekend but just the beginning of seeing more real SAF in real planes real soon. READ MORE