Less hydrogen, more kerosene: how INERATEC is making e-SAF cheaper at ERA ONE

When SPIN reported in June that ERA ONE had become the world’s first Fischer-Tropsch Power-to-Liquid plant with fully RFNBO-certified fuels, the open question was the next one: how does a certified plant become a cheaper one? INERATEC’s latest newsletter gives two answers, both of them engineering rather than policy. One is a partnership with Ramboll to build the upgrading unit that will turn ERA ONE’s synthetic crude into finished jet fuel on site. The other is a catalyst collaboration with Zeopore that cuts the hydrogen that upgrading consumes – by double-digit percentages. INERATEC’s Swiss subsidiary, INERATEC Schweiz AG in Aarau, is a SPIN member.

From syncrude to kerosene, on site

A Fischer-Tropsch reactor does not produce kerosene. It produces a spread of hydrocarbons – light gases, naphtha, a middle fraction and heavy waxes – that has to be upgraded before any of it can be sold as e-SAF or e-diesel. Today that step largely happens off site, in refineries that were built for crude oil. INERATEC appointed the Danish engineering group Ramboll in December 2025 as engineering and project-management contractor for an upgrading unit at ERA ONE in Frankfurt-Höchst, combining hydroisomerisation, hydrocracking and distillation. In September the two companies announced that the pre-FEED phase had been completed and that they are now working on the front-end engineering design – the stage at which a concept becomes a buildable plant. INERATEC has said it plans to install and certify the first upgrading units at ERA ONE in early 2027.

The point of doing this in-house is control. Tim Böltken, INERATEC’s CEO, frames the expansion as taking technological command of further steps in the Power-to-Liquid value chain, so that customers can be offered a reliable long-term supply of synthetic fuel. Ramboll’s Anders Nimgaard Schultz, who leads the group’s Power-to-X and gas infrastructure work, sees ERA ONE as a test of whether sustainable aviation fuel can be produced at industrial scale in Europe at all. A plant that delivers specification-compliant jet fuel at the gate is also a plant that can sign the kind of ten-year offtake deals SPIN wrote about last week.

Where the hydrogen goes

Upgrading is where a surprising share of an e-fuel’s cost is decided. The heavy waxes from Fischer-Tropsch synthesis are cracked and isomerised into branched hydrocarbons in the jet-fuel range – molecules with the low freezing point and combustion behaviour that aviation standards demand. Every crack consumes hydrogen, and hydrogen made from renewable electricity is the single most expensive input in the whole chain. Crack too hard and the process makes light gases instead of kerosene, wasting both carbon and hydrogen. The catalyst determines how much of each happens.

This is where Zeopore comes in. The Belgian catalyst specialist, a spin-off from KU Leuven, engineers zeolites with additional “mesopores” – wider internal channels that let long wax molecules reach the active sites without the diffusion bottleneck that limits standard zeolites. INERATEC has combined these catalysts with its own newly developed low-pressure hydrocracking process, which does away with high-pressure equipment, steam integration and much of the downstream treatment that conventional hydrocrackers need. After extensive testing at INERATEC’s facilities, the company reports a higher e-SAF yield, significantly lower reaction temperatures, longer catalyst life, fewer light by-products – and hydrogen consumption reduced by double-digit percentages. Zeopore’s CEO Kurt Du Mong puts the ambition plainly: shrink the price premium of sustainable fuels and get them industrialised.

Momentum beyond the plant fence

The newsletter adds context that makes the engineering news weightier. INERATEC says it has been contracted by a European ministry of defence to deliver MATERA® e-SAF, with first batches due in the coming weeks – the outcome, in Böltken’s words, of months of work with NATO partners. The European Investment Bank, which already backs ERA ONE with venture debt, named INERATEC an Innovation Champion at its TechEU Equity Summit. And Baden-Württemberg’s Minister-President Cem Özdemir and Environment Minister Thekla Walker visited the Karlsruhe headquarters to discuss what synthetic fuels mean for Europe’s industrial competitiveness, energy resilience and technological sovereignty. Defence buyers, public banks and state governments are converging on the same conclusion: synthetic fuels have moved from climate project to strategic asset.

What it means for the cost gap

SPIN has argued before that the e-SAF problem is not whether the fuel works but what it costs. The European Commission’s 2025 reference prices put RFNBOs at more than twelve times fossil kerosene. Nothing in this newsletter closes that gap on its own. But hydrogen is the dominant cost factor, and a double-digit cut in hydrogen per litre of jet fuel is exactly the sort of improvement that compounds: lower OPEX, lower CAPEX for a simpler plant, a higher share of saleable kerosene per tonne of CO₂ recycled. Combined with on-site upgrading, it also removes the refinery margin and logistics from the equation.

For Switzerland, which shares the EU’s SAF blending mandate but has no production plant of its own, the lesson is twofold. The technology its neighbours are scaling is improving fast, and much of it is developed by a company with a Swiss subsidiary. What is still missing on the Swiss side is bankable demand – the double-sided auction that Germany, Austria and Luxembourg are launching, or an equivalent. Better catalysts make every franc of such an instrument go further. They do not replace it.

Sources: INERATEC, “Next Era Letter” No. 5 (September 2026); press release on the Zeopore collaboration; press release on the Ramboll appointment; CHEManager on the FEED phase.

🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.