South African petrochemicals giant Sasol is actively examining second-generation biofuel feedstocks – that is, energy crops – assured the group’s Sustainable Carbon Solutions Head, Ken Sarman, on Wednesday. He was speaking at the annual Digby Wells Sustainability Breakfast, held in Cape Town on the fringes of the Investing in African Mining Indaba 2025 conference.

In the meantime, the company was making use of used cooking oils as feedstocks. “We’ve already produced our first [small] batches of biodiesel using cooking oil feedstocks,” he reported.

On Tuesday, Sasol announced that it was partnering with major global miner Anglo American to investigate the use of energy crops to rehabilitate mining land and to serve as feedstocks for biofuels, which would then be offtaken by Anglo American and diamond miner De Beers, to power their machinery and vehicles. Phase 1 of the project would establish the viability of growing energy crops at the mines, and of creating a biofuel/renewable diesel feedstock supply chain.

Sarman clarified that biodiesel and renewable diesel were not the same product. (Both made use of biologically derived feedstocks; in the case of renewable diesel, these were often soybean oil and canola oil; but they were made with very different processing technologies.) Biodiesel had blending limits, but renewable diesel did not, and 100% renewable diesel could simply be “dropped into” any modern diesel engine, without any need for modifications. That fact was of course a huge benefit for the mining industry.

He highlighted that Sasol had huge world-class refining assets, some of which could be modified to use biological feedstocks, such as biomass. Experiments and tests were already under way. The group’s other facilities were already feedstock agnostic and could take biofuel feedstocks without modification.

Globally, the adoption of biofuels was being driven by two factors, he pointed out. First, and mainly in developed countries (but also now in India), there were regulatory “pushes” – governments requiring blending mandates. Second, consumer “pulls” – customers demanding biofuels. An example of the latter would be mining companies, which had set their own voluntary greenhouse-gas emission reduction targets (and miners were often under pressure from their shareholders and customers to do so).

“In South Africa, we don’t really have blending mandates in place,” he observed. “We need to work in a local environment in which the demand for low carbon fuels will come from customers. We’re going to have to work with customers and partner with them.”

Currently, he reported, the vast majority of used cooking oils in South Africa were aggregated and then exported to developed countries, to be used as feedstocks for their biofuel production. Such global biofuel feedstock supply chains had already been developed. Biofuel technology was actually a mature technology. It just needed scaling up. But the supply of first-generation feedstocks was already becoming constrained, hence Sasol’s focus on energy crops, which were second-generation feedstocks.