The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) reports on the latest milestone of the CARE-O-SENE project on its Research for Sustainability (FONA) website.

The team of the German-South African research project has succeeded in producing a new catalyst on a semi-commercial scale at Sasol's facilities in South Africa and successfully subjected it to a 67-day “stress test”. Catalysts play a key role in the large-scale production of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).

You can find the full FONA article here and in the November issue of the newsletter (only available in German).

As recently reported 1.8 tonnes of the new catalyst have been produced on a semi-commercial scale.

The so called “Catalyst One” has now successfully passed a 67-day “stress test”. The catalyst was tested with conventional feedstocks in the world’s largest Fischer-Tropsch demonstration reactor (FTDR) in South Africa with a capacity of over 100 barrels per day. During the test, the new catalyst proved its performance under realistic conditions. The results show that “Catalyst One” works as expected under commercially representative conditions. It delivers Fischer-Tropsch crude - wax and condensates - of a quality that predicts a production yield of over 80 percent jet fuel. To provide reliable proof of this, the resulting crude products have now been sent to another partner of the CARE-O-SENE project: Topsoe from Denmark, a world leader in catalysis and process technology and Sasol's long-term partner in processing of Fischer-Tropsch products. There, the crude products are further refined up to the final product kerosene.

Further to this, the catalyst samples taken during the test are providing important additional data that will significantly advance the CARE-O-SENE consortium’s research into the behaviour of catalysts under representative industrial conditions.