TotalEnergiesin CEO Patrick Pouyanné puhuu viimeisimmässä webcastissa SAFista, eri tavoista tuottaa, markkinadynamiikasta, uusiutuvien investoinneista, jne. Hyvä tarina, jos jotakuta kiinnostaa. Boldasin tuosta kohdan, jossa hän kertoo, että SAFia voidaan tuottaa perinteisissä jalostamoissa oheistuotteena, ja että se on/voi olla yksi syy miksi investointeja uusiin biojalostamoihin on jäädytetty.
Jean-Pierre is the expert of working capital, but I will try to help him. First, on the SAF there are different ways to produce SAF. The easy way, the cheapest way, is to go from lipids, used cooking oil, animal fats, different wastes, palm oil, etc. These ones are profitable, and we need to continue to invest in them because we have these mandates and we could have a shortage. Then, you have other projects, which for me, are more critical, where we have not invested today. They are methanol to jet or going to e-SAF, green hydrogen, which are all complex and expensive. In fact, they are not meeting customer demand because the airlines are complaining but they want the cheapest option. In my view, we can meet the mandate by 2030-2035, just by remaining on the cheapest technology. I understand why some people are cancelling some projects, which seem to be on the high side of the capital intensity. On the other side, I think the difficulty is that it is a regulated market so sometimes you have highs and lows. In 2024, the HVOs were quite low priced and suddenly you saw a depression because the Scandinavian countries changed their rules of the game. This year, in 2024, Germany is helping everybody because they have decided that all the inventories we had in our bio quotas, have disappeared, so there is suddenly a shortage, and the price is going up. That is the difficulty with this market, and you have to navigate it. There is a nice way to make SAF with co-processing and that is also the reason why there have been some cancellations. The airline industry has allowed us to do this because it was just a normative debate. Can you make SAF with coprocessing, where you inject used cooking oil into a refinery, you produce kerosene and can you make the mass balance to see if what you have produced is SAF. It is not a real SAF but it is SAF by aggregation. They have decided, in July, last summer, that it is acceptable because it is much cheaper. Of course, by doing that they have pushed back the other big projects that are delivering real SAF, like the one we will produce, which are more expensive, because they were afraid that they could not have enough SAF, and they are cheaper. I think coprocessing has taken quite a good space in the market and that is also why I think some of our colleagues have said why they should continue to invest in greenfield projects if they can produce these products just by combining products in their own refineries. That means the game has changed and that is a difficulty with these molecules, which are very regulated, they changed the way you accept the things, so you have this market and that is why, investing in Capex you need to be clear, you can do it but on the most efficient projects. I continue to be convinced that it is certainly not going to be greenfield for us, it is just transforming into biofuels all the old, unprofitable refineries in declining European markets. For me, that is a good thing to do and the condition to do that, and that is one difficulty, is to find a way to integrate the upstream because then there is a value in all this used cooking oil, animal fats, etc. We have built a partnership with a German company, SARIA, on Grandpuits and we exploring extending this partnership to other projects because the integration is the way to secure the value chain. It is not just about being the transformer of a feedstock, which could go high and an outlet that could go down, it could be a complete squeeze and that is the economic difficulty. Again, I am not afraid, I think you have a game there. The airline companies are shouting that they lack SAF because they want the price to go down to provoke overcapacity, it is a commodity business. In fact, in the maths when you make the market, I am more afraid to have overcapacity than undercapacity by 2030. For them, the game is to say, look we have a shortage. The conclusion is that in Europe we face another difficulty, which I discussed with a Commissioner in Brussels, which is today we are importing SAF from China because airline companies say there is a shortage. When you import from China you have to be sure they meet all the criteria we do in Europe. Investing in new units in Europe when you have all these imports of SAF allowed from China does not make much sense. It is a big difficulty for me on these molecules, there are plenty of regulated elements that make the investment decision not easy, but at the same time, let us move. It is clearly a complex market, but it is market, and I think we have some good cards to play on this one if we put the integration together, low Capex and being serious about it. For us, it will not be a major source of revenues, and I do not expect it to be billions of free cash. However, it helps me transform some losses, as we have done in La Mède where we went from minus 100 M$ a year to plus 30 M$, then it is fine and it is worth making the investment because we have jobs, etc., and that is fine, that is the objective.