Thailand’s First Sustainable Aviation Fuel Plant: From 20% Built to First Export

Project Overview

The video comes from Bangkok Biz News (Krungthep Turakij), which filmed the Go Green 2024 seminar on 25 April 2024. Gloyta Na Thalang, Bangchak Corporation’s acting deputy president for sustainability and communications, gave the keynote — timed to the company’s 40th anniversary and its “5th decade” milestone.

Bangchak started as a single oil refinery in Bangkok’s Phra Khanong district. Today it runs five business lines: the original refining and retail fuel business, renewable power generation through BCPG, biofuels through BBGI, biotech through Bangchak Life Solutions, and petroleum exploration through its Norway-based subsidiary OKEA. It also backs Winnonie, a battery-swap platform for electric motorcycles, and the Carbon Markets Club, a cross-industry group promoting carbon credit trading.

Bangchak frames all of this under a plan it calls BCP 316 NET — its route to carbon neutrality by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Read our full guide to heat battery. The plan has four parts, according to Bangchak’s investor relations site: Breakthrough Performance, efficiency gains across existing operations, carries 30% of the weight; Conserving Nature and Society, reforestation and mangrove or seagrass restoration, carries 10%; and Proactive Business Growth, building entirely new clean-energy business lines like the SAF plant, carries the largest share at 60%. A fourth piece, the Net Zero Ecosystem, covers market infrastructure like the Carbon Markets Club and isn’t assigned a fixed percentage.

From 20% Built to Exporting: Thailand’s First SAF Plant

Sustainable aviation fuel is jet fuel made from renewable feedstock instead of crude oil — chemically close enough to conventional kerosene that it can be blended into existing aircraft and pipelines without engine changes. Bangchak’s version uses used cooking oil (UCO) as its main input, processed into HEFA-SPK, a synthetic paraffinic kerosene made through hydroprocessing of esters and fatty acids.

In the video, Na Thalang describes the plant, at Bangchak’s Phra Khanong refinery, as “approximately 20 percent complete.” That was April 2024. The company broke ground on the project after roughly a decade of running Thailand’s used-cooking-oil collection network for biodiesel — the same feedstock chain feeds both products.

Bangchak reached its first milestone on 29 April 2025, unveiling and certifying the finished facility. Commercial-scale output took another year: the plant started commercial production in May 2026, built with technology from Desmet (Belgium) and UOP Honeywell (United States), and certified under ISCC EU, ISCC CORSIA, and ISCC PLUS — the standards international buyers require for traceable, sustainable feedstock. The company shipped its first international export cargo on 19 May 2026, according to Bangchak Corporation.

Then came the domestic milestone: on 16 July 2026, Bangchak supplied Thai-produced SAF to a Thai Airways flight for the first time, blended into the fuel for flight TG904 from Bangkok to Singapore. It was Bangchak’s first SAF sale to a Thai airline, and the company says the blend cuts life-cycle emissions by up to 80% versus conventional jet fuel, per Bangchak’s newsroom.

Where the Cooking Oil Actually Comes From

Na Thalang used part of her talk to explain the household side of the supply chain — and it doubles as food-safety advice. Her guidance: fry with an oil once, maybe twice at most, then stop. Related: Bangkok waste management. Reused oil past that point carries real health risks, and she was blunt about the alternative some households choose instead — pouring it down the drain or into canals.

Instead, collectors buy used cooking oil directly from households and food vendors, feeding it into Bangchak’s biodiesel and now SAF supply chains. It’s a small, practical loop: oil that would otherwise clog drains or get re-fried past the point of safety becomes feedstock for jet fuel instead.

Why Airlines Need This Now

Aviation is hard to decarbonize with batteries — Na Thalang noted in the seminar that electric flight “isn’t viable yet” for anything beyond very short hops, so fuel-side substitution is the near-term lever. Governments are now forcing that substitution through blending mandates rather than waiting for the market to move on its own.

Thailand’s own mandate arrived on 1 January 2026: a 1% SAF blend requirement for jet fuel, starting at Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang airports, according to Nation Thailand. The EU moved first and goes further — its ReFuelEU Aviation regulation set a 2% SAF blending floor for 2025, rising to 6% by 2030 and 70% by 2050, per the Carbon Gap policy tracker. Any flight landing in the EU has to comply regardless of where it took off, which is part of why a Thailand-based SAF exporter has a ready international customer base.

Financing the Shift: Thailand’s Carbon Credit Market

The seminar’s second thread was carbon credits — and Na Thalang spoke about it in two roles at once, as a Bangchak executive and as chair of the Carbon Markets Club, the group Bangchak founded. Her framing: credit sales fund the clean energy transition directly, because companies buy credits, sellers reinvest the money into decarbonization projects, and the cycle repeats.

In 2024, she described Thailand’s carbon credit market as still voluntary and thin, sitting on a large stock of unretired credits — a gap she attributed mostly to low awareness rather than lack of supply. The scale of that gap is stark: Thai projects issued roughly 20.5 million tons of verified T-VER credits between 2016 and October 2024, but only about 3.5 million tons were ever bought, leaving close to 17 million tons unsold, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington.

The Carbon Markets Club itself is proof of how fast awareness has grown even without a mandate: founded in June 2021 with 11 member organizations, it had grown to nearly 1,000 by the time of the seminar. By its fifth anniversary in 2026, according to Bangchak Corporation, membership had passed 1,800 — more than 160 times the founding count.

The market underneath that club has also moved. Thailand’s domestic voluntary standard, T-VER, traded about 3.29 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent between 2020 and 2024, worth roughly 314.5 million THB cumulatively, per the Thailand Greenhouse Gas Management Organization’s 2025 survey. Credits now trade around 80-300 THB per tonne depending on project type and vintage. And the cross-border limit Na Thalang flagged in 2024 — “buying and selling is only allowed within Thailand” — is already easing: BCPG and the Carbon Markets Club have an active partnership with the Macao Emission Exchange, advancing cross-border trading of carbon credits and renewable energy certificates through 2026.

This is one corner of Thailand’s broader renewable energy policy push, and it sits alongside the bioenergy investments described above — both are pieces of the same net-zero roadmap Bangchak laid out in the seminar.

What’s Coming: The Climate Change Act

Thailand doesn’t have a mandatory carbon market yet — the voluntary T-VER system and Carbon Markets Club membership are opt-in. That’s changing, but slowly. A draft Climate Change Act, approved by cabinet in December 2025, would create Thailand’s first mandatory emissions trading scheme, requiring designated companies to surrender allowances matching their verified emissions.

As of this writing, the Act is still in legal review, not yet passed by Parliament and not yet published in the Royal Gazette — so it isn’t law. Even once enacted, the emissions trading scheme it authorizes isn’t expected to name covered sectors until 2027-2028, with a pilot phase targeted around 2029. Existing T-VER credits are designed to convert into compliance allowances once the scheme exists, which is part of why current voluntary demand matters now.

Key Takeaways

• Bangchak’s SAF plant went from roughly 20% built (April 2024) to certified (April 2025) to fully operational and exporting (May 2026) — and supplied its first domestic airline flight in July 2026.
• The plant runs on used cooking oil collected from Thai households and vendors — the same feedstock chain as the company’s older biodiesel business.
• Thailand’s 1% SAF blending mandate took effect 1 January 2026; the EU’s mandate is already at 2% and rising to 6% by 2030.
• Thailand’s carbon credit market is still voluntary. Between 2016 and October 2024, Thai projects issued 20.5 million tons of T-VER credits but sold only 3.5 million — a roughly 17-million-ton oversupply.
• The Carbon Markets Club grew from 11 founding members in 2021 to over 1,800 by its fifth anniversary in 2026 — a sign awareness is outpacing actual demand.
• Cross-border carbon credit trading, which wasn’t possible in 2024, is now being piloted through a partnership with Macao’s carbon exchange.
• A mandatory carbon trading scheme is still a draft bill — not law — with a pilot not expected before 2029.

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